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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.
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
Seems
Perfection
Tragically
Men
Organization
Deafness
Like
Subjects
Involuntary
Seem
Organizations
Help
Unable
Understand
Cruelty
Helping
Near
Sightedness
Another
Subject
Fallibility
More quotes by John Cheever
I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
John Cheever
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
John Cheever
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
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 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
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
Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
John Cheever
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
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
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
John Cheever
Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.
John Cheever
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
John Cheever
Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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
The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.
John Cheever
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
