Quotes from 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.

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

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

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...

She perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how cruel and frail it was, like a worn piece of burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness.

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

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?

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

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.

It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. How far that little candle throws its beams, she exclaimed. So shines a good dead in a naughty world.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?

The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began.

For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.

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.