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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?

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
Nuts
Wrench
Describe
Wrenches
Changing
Exalted
Physical
Describing
Sex
Tire
Lives
Jack
Experience
Flat
Flats

More quotes by 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.
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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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.
John Cheever
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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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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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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A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
John Cheever
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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
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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The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
John Cheever
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
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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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.
John Cheever
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever