John Cheever Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

John Cheever
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

John Cheever
I don't work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts.

John Cheever
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss—you can't do it alone.

John Cheever
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

John Cheever
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.

John Cheever
Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

John Cheever
Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

John Cheever
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

John Cheever
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

John Cheever
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

John Cheever
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

John Cheever
All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

John Cheever
... your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.

John Cheever
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

John Cheever
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

John Cheever
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.

John Cheever
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
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 love and friendship.

John Cheever
One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.

John Cheever
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 dream.

John Cheever
He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.

John Cheever
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.

John Cheever
The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.

John Cheever
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.

John Cheever
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

John Cheever
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 flat tire?

John Cheever
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.

John Cheever
I have been attacked by a nuisance of a cancer. My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am bald as an egg.

John Cheever
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.

John Cheever