John Cheever Quotes

He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

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.

Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

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.

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.

When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

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.

All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.

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.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.