John Cheever Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — John Cheever

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. — John Cheever

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle ... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably. — John Cheever

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder. — John Cheever

I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery. — John Cheever

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

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside. — John Cheever

I did another commercial. Don't lose your loved ones, I wrote, because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium 90 in your bones. Don't be a victim of fallout. When the tart on Thirty-sixth Street gives you the big eye does your body stride off in one direction and your imagination in another? Does your mind follow her up the stairs and taste her wares in revolting detail while your flesh goes off to Brooks Brothers or the foreign exchange desk of the Chase Manhattan Bank? Haven't you noticed the size of the ferns, the lushness of the grass, the bitterness of the string beans, and the brilliant makings on the new breeds of butterflies? You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twenty-five years and only Elixircol can save you. — John Cheever

I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves. — John Cheever

They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets. — John Cheever

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. — John Cheever

She came right up to me and put her snow-white hand on my arm. "You poor boy," she murmured, "you poor boy."
I'm not a boy, and I'm not poor, and I wished the hell she would get away. She has a clever face, but I felt in it, that night, the force of a great sadness and great malice. "I see a rope around your neck," she said sadly. — John Cheever

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 so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously. — John Cheever

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 have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky. — John Cheever

Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch. — John Cheever

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor. — 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

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 I can lay my shaking hands on. — 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

What I did not understand, as I walked down Fifth Avenue that afternoon, was how a world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet. — John Cheever

There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business. — John Cheever

Rachel's way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate young woman is unfathomable. — John Cheever

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story. — John Cheever

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. — John Cheever

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual. — John Cheever

He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy. — John Cheever

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind. — John Cheever

Nils's gardens no longer bore any relationship to the needs of the house. Each spring he plowed and planted acres of vegetables and flowers. The coming up of the asparagus shoots was the signal for a hopeless race between the vegetables and Mrs. Garrison's table. Nils, embittered by the waste that he himself was the author of, came each evening to the kitchen door to tell the cook that unless they are more peas, more strawberries, more beans, more lettuce, more cabbages, the magnificent vegetables that he had watered with his sweat would rot.
- The Common Day — John Cheever

Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord. — John Cheever

Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner. — 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

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 have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing. — John Cheever

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin. — John Cheever

The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard. — John Cheever

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. — 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

Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband's lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion. — John Cheever

He saw the role of the serious writer as both lofty and practical in the same instant. He used to say that literature was one of the first indications of civilization. He used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache. Like many great healers, he meant to heal himself. — John Cheever

The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time. — John Cheever

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone. — John Cheever

The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. — John Cheever

Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy's old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile. — John Cheever

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death. — John Cheever

These napkins are more holy than righteous, Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns. — John Cheever

I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell's Modern Europe sometime last summer. — John Cheever

Her hair was dyed, and her bloom was fading, and she must have been crowding forty, but she seemed to be one of those women who cling to the manners and graces of a pretty child of eight. — John Cheever

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 none of this in my accounts. — John Cheever

In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it. — John Cheever

All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and
shells and alchemists' gold and kelp and the riggish
smell of neap tides, the inshore green, and purple
further out and the joy of distances and the roar of
falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn't
come out of the sea for all of us. — John Cheever

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. — John Cheever

You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore. — John Cheever

There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two - a spiritual no-man's-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts. — John Cheever

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun. — John Cheever

Homesickness is absolutely nothing," she said angrily. "It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don't suppose you're old enough to understand. When you're in one place and long to be in another, it isn't as simple as taking a boat. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find. — John Cheever

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another. — John Cheever

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. — John Cheever

As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish - without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time - I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand. — John Cheever

The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil. — John Cheever

Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos had faded to a tracery of ash, whose crotch hair was sparse and gray, whose flesh hung slack on his bones, whose only trespass on life was a flat guitar and a remembered and pitiful air of "I don't know where it is, sir, but I'll find it, sir," and whose name was known nowhere, nowhere in the far reaches of the earth or in the far reaches of his memory, where, when he talked to himself, he talked to himself as Chicken Number Two. — 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

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us. — John Cheever

The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play. — John Cheever

Will you let me lift you?" he said. "Just let me lift you. Just let me see how light you are."
"All right," she said. "Do you want me to take off my coat?"
"Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Take off your coat."
She stood. She let her coat fall to the sofa.
"Can I do it now?" he said.
"Yes."
He put his hands under her arms. He raised her off the floor and then put her down gently. "Oh you're so light!" he shouted. "Your'e so light, you're so fragile, you don't weigh any more than a suitcase. Why, I could carry you, I could carry you anywhere, I could carry you from one end of New York to the other." He got his hat and coat and ran out of the house. — 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

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 creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world. — John Cheever

I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities. — John Cheever

A page of good prose remains invincible. — John Cheever

So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of live were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions ... — John Cheever

I write to make sense of my life.
-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey — John Cheever

I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. — John Cheever

Hurry, hurry, hurry, she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over. — John Cheever

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. — 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

Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. — John Cheever

Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and the fourth had died of delirium tremens. — John Cheever

We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another ... Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border. — John Cheever

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy. — John Cheever

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? — John Cheever

Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked ... The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life. — John Cheever

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

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

IT WAS ONE of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night. — John Cheever

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

This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. — John Cheever

I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers. — John Cheever

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

Ben and I walked by the Forum, which, with the green grass still growing among the stones, seems to be a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers, for we see not only the ghosts of Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and men with beards and little children rolling hoops. — John Cheever

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? — John Cheever

Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail — John Cheever

It is unlikely that Percy would have written my mother after her return from Europe, and, had she written, the letter would have been destroyed, since that family had a crusading detestation of souvenirs. Letters, photographs, diplomas - anything that authenticated the past was always thrown into the fire. — John Cheever

Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife. — John Cheever

There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. "Are you all right, darling?" he asked. "Yes," a woman said wearily. "Yes, I'm all right, I guess," and then she added with great feeling, "But you know, Charlie, I don't feel like myself anymore. Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week when I feel like myself. I don't like to go to another doctor, because the doctor's bills are so awful already, but I just don't feel like myself, Charlie. I just never feel like myself. — John Cheever

At her dressing table putting on earrings. She is a pretty woman in the prime of life, and her ignorance of financial necessity is complete. Her neck is graceful, her breasts gleamed as they rose in the cloth of her dress, and, seeing the decent and healthy delight she took in her own image, I could not tell her that we were broke. She had sweetened much of my life, and to watch her seemed to freshen the wellsprings of some clear energy in me that made the room and the pictures on the wall and the moon that could see outside the window all vivid and cheerful. — John Cheever

So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle — John Cheever

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old. — John Cheever

His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. — 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