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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

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
Opium
Understands
Truly
Pain
Death
Eater

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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.
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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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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
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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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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.
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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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.
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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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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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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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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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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 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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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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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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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.
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