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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

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
Stones
Dampness
Hair
Prematurely
Causes
Ecclesiastical
Church
Kneeling
Churches
Grey
Stone
Avoid

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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
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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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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.
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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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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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.
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We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman.
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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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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Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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