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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

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
Emotion
Education
Advantages
American
Adult
Culture
Disappointment
Main
Adults
Advantage
Wealth

More quotes by John Cheever

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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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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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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
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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.
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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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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
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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 short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
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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
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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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