John Cheever Quotes
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.
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The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
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All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
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A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.
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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
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I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
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Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
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He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.
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For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
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It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
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A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
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Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
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The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
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My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.
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We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
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The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.