Quote

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

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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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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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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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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 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.
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These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.
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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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Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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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.
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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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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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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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.
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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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