Quote

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.

John Cheever

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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Rain
Lends
Battle
Youthful
Beauty
Hears
Power
Prose
Give
Page
Giving
Noise
Writing
Grief
Good
Pages
Universality

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The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.
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There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
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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.
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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.
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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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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.
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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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.
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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.
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The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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