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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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Strength
Novel
Longings
Records
Decency
Form
Complexity
Men
Longing
Forms
Record
Remains

More quotes by John Cheever

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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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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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.
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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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.
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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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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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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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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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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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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
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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.
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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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
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Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever
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Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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