Quotes from John Cheever

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

To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.

The moral bottom had dropped out of my world without changing a mote of sunlight.

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

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

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

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

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.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

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

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

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 at all.

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.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

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.