John Cheever Quotes

80 quotes in 1180 categories

• It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
• Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
• All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
• The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
• I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
• 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…
• That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
• I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy…
• I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
• I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever…
• You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
• The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
• I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
• Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
• 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…
• When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
• Art is the triumph over chaos.
• Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't…
• When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
• Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

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