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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
Possibilities
Criticism
Possibility
Persons
Person
Love

More quotes by John Cheever

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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.
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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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever
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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.
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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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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
John Cheever
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How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?
John Cheever
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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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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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever