Quotes from 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.

He had dragged her good name through a hundred escapades, debauched her excellence, and thrown away her love, but she had never imagined that he would betray her in their plans for the end of the world.

There was a sharp pain in my heart, as if that lumpy organ had weathered every abuse, only to be crippled by misery.

When I agreed to call him about lunch he gave me his telephone number at the shipyard, his extension there, the telephone number of his apartment, the telephone number of a cottage he had in Connecticut, and the telephone number of the club where he lunched and played cards. I wrote all these numbers on a piece of paper and when we said goodbye I dropped the paper into a wastebasket.

He had been asked to take the collection at Holy Communion, and so he did, but, when he got to his knees to make his general confession, he could not admit that what he had done was an offense to divine majesty; the burden of his sins was not intolerable; the memory of them was anything but grievous.

The study of Euclid put him into a compassionate and tranquil frame of mind, and illuminated, among other things, that his thinking and feeling had recently been crippled by confusion and despair.

He improvised a heretical thanksgiving for the constancy and intelligence of his wife, the clear eyes of his children, and the suppleness of his mistress.

How could I embrace decently and with the full ardor of my body and mind someone I suspected of murder? Was I embracing despair, was this an obscene passion, had I at that wedding so many years ago seen not beauty at all, but cruelty in her large eyes?

since these are hours and days out of one's life, can there be any other course but to look back into them, even though at times they seem like waste?

She grieves because her grief is not an acute grief, and when I tell her that this sorrow over the inadequacies of her sorrow may be a new hue in the spectrum of human pain, she is not consoled.

These stories date from my Honorable Discharge from the Army at the end of World War II. Their order is, to the best of my memory, chronological and the most embarrassingly immature pieces have been dropped. These stories seem 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 the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

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.

Her eyes filled with tears when she thought of kissing Mamma and giving her the silver-framed photograph of Dana Andrews that she had bought at Woolworth's for her present.

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

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.

They were the kind of party where the company is never very numerous and the liquor is never very good—parties where, as you drink and talk, you feel a palpable lassitude overtaking any natural social ardor, as if the ties of family, society, school, and place that held the group together were dissolving like the ice in your drink.

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.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

Beware you do not damage, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

The eternal puzzle of why people do that which is not in their interest, and have a desire to lose what is most precious to them, makes Cheever fascinated by the deepest destructions.

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.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

Lo que sentía por Eduardo era más parecido a la nostalgia que al espíritu aventurero del amor tradicional, pero no era un sentimiento menos fuerte. Comprendió que, si verdaderamente buscaba la pureza, nunca la encontraría en sí mismo.

His stepmother -wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks- had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore drinking sherry out of a coffee cup.