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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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Inspired
Save
Case
Routed
Perhaps
Guided
Cases
Damned
Literature
Salvation
World
Lovers
Despair
More quotes by John Cheever
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever
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
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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.
John Cheever
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
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
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
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
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
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.
John Cheever
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.
John Cheever
I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
John Cheever
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
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
I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
John Cheever
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
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
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
John Cheever
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever