Quotes from John Cheever

WE TRAVEL with such velocity these days that the most we can do is to remember a few place names. The freight of metaphysical speculation will have to catch up with us by slow train, if it catches up with us at all.

When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it's hard to meet people.

Charlie continued to complain to most of the tenants when they wished him a merry Christmas, changing his story from the lonely bachelor to the poor father, and back again

in those days I didn't drink, smoke, swear, or speak Italian.

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? 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. 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.

I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, and that he was no more free to fall in love with a strange woman he saw on a street corner than he was to take a walking trip through French Guiana or to recommence his life in Chicago under an assumed name.

Those must be the Fullers, in 11-E," Irene said. "I knew they were giving a party this afternoon. I saw her in the liquor store. Isn't this too divine? Try something else. See if you can get those people in 18-C.

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.

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.

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

Ama bütün evlilikler böyledir signore. Ä°nsanlar sevgi yüzünden evlenseler dünya yaÅŸanacak bir yer deÄŸil, deliler için bir hastane olurdu...

They had come to praise him. It was so beautiful, so comical, so true to life! the doctor said. The little girl gave him the flowers and the Mayor embraced him lightly. Oh, we thought, signore, he said, that you were merely a poet.

Bu hayatta gerçekten unutman?n yolu o kadar nadir bulunuyor ki, diye düÅŸündü.

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

Goodbye, Daddy, I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.

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

Francis asks Julia if the children couldn't have their dinner earlier. Julia's guns are loaded for this. She can't cook two dinners and lay two tables. She paints with lightning strokes that panorama of drudgery in which her youth, her beauty, and her wit have been lost. Francis says that he must be understood; he was nearly killed in an airplane crash, and he doesn't like to come home every night to a battlefield. Now Julia is deeply concerned.

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. Evarts Malloy was very thin. He had worked as a bus driver and he stooped a little

I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed.

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.

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.

Evarts asked the doorman how to get back to the Mentone, but he misunderstood the directions and got lost again. He walked around the East Side until he found a policeman, who directed him back to the hotel.

After five years of marriage he seemed to have been left with nothing to say. It was like being embarrassed by a shortage of money.

Fellatio is the nicest thing one human being can do for another.