Cheever Quotes & Sayings

Art is the triumph over chaos. — John Cheever

A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate. — John Cheever

Among the rewards of his expatriation were a heightened awareness of what he saw and an exhilarating sense of freedom. Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die. — 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

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 — John Cheever

Isn't it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels. — 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

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams. — Kate Bernheimer

Ah, well! then the young woman was only in advance of the age," said Miss Archer; "and what with that and the telephone, and that dreadful phonograph that bottles up all one says and disgorges at inconvenient times, we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of 'that beloved voice,' they will have only to take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah! blissful lovers of the future! — Ella Cheever Thayer

These stories at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke to the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. — John Cheever

Personal experience is the lightning of the soul; it transforms the heart in ways that leave the brain behind. — Susan Cheever

Our [western] culture embraces sex addiction. If I drink too much or rack up credit-card debt or lose the rent in Vegas, that's bad. But if I have many lovers, that's good. — Susan 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

I was swimming with the turd sharks in an ocean made of piss — Sam Cheever

And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality. It seems comical
farcical
that, having been treated so generously, I should be struck with this image of a kid in the rain walking along the road shoulders of East Milton. — John Cheever

(John Cheever thought that you couldn't even type a business letter without revealing something of your inner self - isn't that the truth?) — Mason Currey

I was deep in the poo poo dungeon. — Sam 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

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against. — Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Weeding the peony hedge I hear the windfalls in the orchard; hear them strike the ground, hear them strike against branches as they fall to the ground. The immemorial smell of apples, old as the sea. Mary makes jelly. Up from the kitchen, up the stairs and into all the rooms comes the smell of apples. — John Cheever

I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it's an amazing form that we haven't even begun to tap ... we're just getting started figuring out what the rules are. — Susan 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

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

The CDC reported that 88,000 adults a year die of alcohol consumption. — Susan Cheever

If a woman is surrounded by lovers or if a woman has a lot of guys asking her out, that's considered wonderful. As a woman who's slept with a lot of men, I've always been complimented on my ability to attract men. — Susan Cheever

...years of resolute self-denial, instead of rewarding him with reserves of fortitude, had left him more than ordinarily susceptible to temptation. — John Cheever

The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant. — John Cheever

I think it's a great thing to hear the author reading. I've listened to CDs of Cheever and Updike reading their stories and Hemingway. To hear what their voices were like is amazing. Whether they're reading well or not, it's great to listen to the intonation and the beat of the guy who wrote the story. — T.C. Boyle

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

Whenever there was a crisis, I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain. — Susan Cheever

Obsession is so extreme and so hard to imagine with the rational mind that it has a science-fiction-like quality to it-it's almost as if the obsessed one has been taken over by a replica, a pod, a facsimile of the rational person. — Susan Cheever

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being. — John Cheever

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

Falling in love as we know it is an addictive experience. — Susan 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

He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. "I forgot to tell you," he said. "Liza sent us a wheel of Brie." "That's nice," she said, "but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels." He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. "That's funny," he said. "It constipates me." That was their marriage then
not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fountains, the wind in the alien olive trees, but this: a jay-naked male and female discussing their bowels. — John Cheever

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

Agnes Shay had the true spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and mild eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in back passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants' halls that remind one of a prison, her soul had grown docile and bleak...Agnes loved the ceremonies of a big house. She drew the curtains in the living room at dark, lighted the candles on the table, and struck the dinner chimes like an eager altar boy. On fine evenings, when she sat on the back porch between the garbage pails and the woodbins, she liked to recall the faces of all the cooks she had known. It made her life seem rich. — John Cheever

The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen King. These are honorable writers; but no one doubts it was the size of their contracts that won them covers. The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority, and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it. — Jonathan Franzen

Oh, God, you bore me this morning," my wife said.
"I've been bored for the last six years," I said.
I took a cab to the airport and an afternoon plane back to the city. We had been married twelve years and had been lovers for two years before our marriage, making a total of fourteen years in all that we had been together, and I never saw her again. — 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

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.' — Anna Quindlen

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. — 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

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

Justina's life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all. — John Cheever

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

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 trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies. — John Cheever

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done. — Susan Cheever

You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid. — John Cheever

You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves. — John Cheever

Running has thrown me into adventures that I would otherwise have missed. — Benjamin Cheever

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about. — Blake Bailey

Guilt is petty; I am above guilt. — Susan 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

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

Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation, — John Cheever

I think 12-step programs really work, rehab really works, certain types of therapies and talking to other addicts really work. There are a lot of things that work - that isn't the problem. The problem is getting the addicts to say they're addicts. The problem is admitting it. — Susan Cheever

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

The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer. — Susan Cheever

Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer - with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook - arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers - travelers, at least, with a traveler's acuteness of feeling." --from ""The Seaside Houses — John Cheever

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of a sleeping mind. — John Cheever

God, in his wisdom, sent us his angels, to whisper our names on the wind. God, in his anger, released his devils, to pester our souls to the end. — Sam Cheever

Full lips are better for kissing. — Julia Quinn

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 of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone. — John Cheever

The short story is the literature of the nomad. — 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

I just
I know my own heart and I love you, Turner. And if you have even the tiniest shred of decency, you'll say something because I've said everything I possibly can, and I can't bear the silence, and
oh for heaven's sake! Will you at least blink?
He couldn't even manage that. — Julia Quinn

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

Oh, how wonderful and rich and
strange life can be when you stop playing out the roles that your parents and their friends wrote out
for you. — 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

A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter. — Susan 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

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families. — Susan 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

I was here on earth because I chose to be. — John Cheever

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication. — 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

A wedding isn't for the bride and groom, it's for the family and friends. The B. and G. are just props, silly stick figures with no more significance than the pink and white candy figures on the top of the cake. — Susan 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

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics. — John Cheever

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But — Andrew Klavan

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

Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made. — 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

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

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