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

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
Love
Possibilities
Criticism
Possibility
Persons
Person

More quotes by John Cheever

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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.
John Cheever
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
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Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
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Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever
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All things of the sea belong to Venus pearls and shells and alchemists' gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore green, and purple further out and the joy of distances and the roar of falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn't come out of the sea for all of us.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever
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For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.
John Cheever
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever