Quote

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
Men
Organization
Deafness
Like
Subjects
Involuntary
Seem
Organizations
Help
Unable
Understand
Cruelty
Helping
Near
Sightedness
Another
Subject
Fallibility
Seems
Perfection
Tragically

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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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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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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?
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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.
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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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 writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
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My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.
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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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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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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.
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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.
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I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.
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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.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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