John Cheever Quotes

80 quotes in 1180 categories

• Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
• I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
• Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia…
• It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of…
• The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
• I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps,…
• Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.
• Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find…
• If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill…
• How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a…
• To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness,…
• 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…
• There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
• Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous…
• Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We…
• Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
• The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to…
• These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light,…
• For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.
• Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

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