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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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Children
Destiny
Merchants
Mean
Ordinary
Prince
Kind
Knew
Envy
Always
Child
Lows
Never
Born
King
Wring
World
Living
Kinds
Detestable
Business
Meant
Merchant
Whole
Kings
Degrading

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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.
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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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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
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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.
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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.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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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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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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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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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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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
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I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
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The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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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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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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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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