John Cheever Quotes
Top 72 wise famous quotes and sayings by John Cheever
John Cheever Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from John Cheever on Wise Famous Quotes.
Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.
His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life
I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
...years of resolute self-denial, instead of rewarding him with reserves of fortitude, had left him more than ordinarily susceptible to temptation.
This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?
I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.
Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.
Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
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.
Even a selected display of one's early work will be a naked history of one's struggle to receive an education in economics and love.
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy.
Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?
He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
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.
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.
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us - a
The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.
I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed.
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
IT WAS ONE of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.
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.