Making Love As Though We’re an Endangered Species

Peter De Vries? Laurence J. Peter? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: Do you know who is responsible for crafting the following vivid and humorous simile?:

They made love as though they were an endangered species.

Is this the correct phrasing? I do not know whether such lovemaking would be celebratory, frenetic, fatalistic, or hopeless.

Reply from Quote Investigator: The earliest match located by QI appeared in 1973 within the novel “Forever Panting” by Peter De Vries. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:^[1] 1973 Copyright, Forever Panting by Peter De Vries, Chapter 1, Quote Page 20 and 21, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans)

That night Dolly and I made love as though we were an endangered species, and, oh, how gratefully one sinks into that sweet membraneous vortex of which the descent into sleep then seems the soft continuance, till the bliss and the peace together are one funneling whirlpool . . .

Peter De Vries used this simile again later in the book:^[2] 1973 Copyright, Forever Panting by Peter De Vries, Chapter 16, Quote Page 270, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans)

I come to you, a landlady with eleven children all of whom have left you to become ecologists. Thanks to the likes of them we may yet attain zero population growth. All right. You take me in, clasp me to your evacuated bosom, and, making love as though we’re an endangered species—”

Below are two additional selected citations.

In 1977 the popular compilation “Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time” edited by Laurence J. Peter contained a different phrasing of the expression attributed to De Vries:^[3] 1977, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time, Compiled by Laurence J. Peter, Section: Similes, Quote Page 442, William Morrow and Company, New York. (Verified on with hardcopy)

They made love as though they were an endangered species.
—Peter De Vries

In 2008 the “Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations” edited by Ned Sherrin included an entry that credited De Vries and pointed to Peter’s compilation:^[4] 2008, Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Edited by Ned Sherrin, Category: Love, Page 193, Oxford University Press, New York. (Verified on paper)

They made love as though they were an endangered species.
Peter de Vries 1910-93: Laurence J. Peter (ed.) Quotations for our Time (1977)

In conclusion, Peter De Vries deserves credit for the statements he wrote in 1973 within “Forever Panting”. The phrasing attributed to De Vries by Laurence J. Peter in 1977 differed from the phrasing in the novel.

Images Notes: Depiction of the Dodo by Frederick William Frohawk. Plate 24 from Extinct Birds (1907) by Walter Rothschild. The Dodo was an endangered flightless bird in the 1600s, and it is now extinct.

(Great thanks to anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.)