Quote

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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
World
Courage
Relish
Blood
Knife
Stand
Tastes
Woman
Knives
Fear
Gentle
House
Admire
Love
Straight
Like
Taste
Rusty

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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.
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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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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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.
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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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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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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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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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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.
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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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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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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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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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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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It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
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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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