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
Love
Straight
Like
Taste
Rusty
World
Courage
Relish
Blood
Knife
Stand
Tastes
Woman
Knives
Fear
Gentle
House
Admire

More quotes by John Cheever

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Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.
John Cheever
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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 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.
John Cheever
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
John Cheever
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Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save 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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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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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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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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 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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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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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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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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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