Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked.… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains,… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock,… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy,… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.” — John Cheever Copy Share Image
We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others,… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“She perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how cruel and frail it was, like a worn piece of burlap, patched with… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg,… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“His stepmother -wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks- had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world.… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
