Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries turns a medieval sin into a modern diagnosis with one clean reversal: gluttony isn’t about eating too much, it’s about being eaten from the inside. The line works because it treats appetite as alibi. “Emotional escape” suggests a getaway car parked in the pantry; the excess isn’t pleasure so much as anesthesia, a way to outrun grief, boredom, shame, or dread for a few chemically sweet minutes. By framing gluttony as a “sign,” De Vries also makes it legible: not a moral failure to condemn, but a symptom to read.

The bite of the sentence is in its second clause, where metaphor becomes accusation. “Something is eating us” flips agency. The glutton isn’t the predator; they’re the prey. That twist carries a quiet cynicism about self-control narratives: if you’re wrestling food, you’re probably wrestling something else that won’t show itself in daylight. De Vries, a sharp-tongued American novelist with a comedian’s timing, distills a whole critique of mid-century respectability into a single pun. His era was big on surfaces - suburban prosperity, tidy self-presentation, private misery kept politely offstage. Compulsion, then, becomes a socially acceptable leak.

Intent-wise, he’s not excusing excess; he’s relocating blame from the dinner table to the psyche. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: before you mock the overindulgence, ask what hunger is being substituted for. In a culture that sells comfort by the bite, the line lands as both empathy and indictment.