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John Cheever Quotes

John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included "The Enormous Radio", "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Five-Forty-Eight", "The Country Husband", and "The Swimmer", and he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle ,The Wapshot Scandal , Bullet Park , Falconer and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems .

His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters who embody the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life , characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.

A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award.On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. May 1912 – 18. June 1982   •   Other names جان چیور
John Cheever photo

Works

The Wapshot Chronicle
The Wapshot Chronicle
John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever: 36   quotes 1   like

Famous John Cheever Quotes

“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.”

John Cheever

The Sixties, 1963 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

“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

“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”

John Cheever

Christian Science Monitor (October 24, 1979).

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

John Cheever

Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal (September 8, 1979).

“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

Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

John Cheever Quotes about the world

“One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.”

John Cheever

On the assassination of John F. Kennedy
The Sixties, 1963 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

“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

The Sixties, 1966 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

“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. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.”

John Cheever

Accepting National Book Award, The Writer (September 1958).

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

John Cheever

“The Bella Lingua” in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964).

“Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

John Cheever Quotes about people

“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.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

“The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.”

John Cheever

The Sixties, 1963 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

“People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”

John Cheever

The Sixties, 1966 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

John Cheever Quotes

“For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.”

John Cheever
Lovers , Change , Parting

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

John Cheever

Newsweek (October 20, 1986).

Life , Men

“I was here on earth because I chose to be.”

John Cheever book The Stories of John Cheever

Source: The Stories of John Cheever

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

John Cheever

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1956 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Wisdom , Knowledge , Evil

“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

Accepting National Medal for Literature (April 27, 1982).

Youth , Beauty , Universe

“A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.”

John Cheever

Quoted in James Charlton's The Writer’s Quotation Book (1980).

Youth

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

John Cheever

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1952 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Heart

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

John Cheever

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1955 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Understanding , Sleep

“What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.”

John Cheever

Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

Literature

“Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.”

John Cheever

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1955 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Love , Pleasure , Law , Cars

“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.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

“Art is the triumph over chaos.”

John Cheever

The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978).

Art

“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.”

John Cheever

Letter to Philip Roth (May 10, 1982); The Letters of John Cheever (1989).

Cats

“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.”

John Cheever

The Sixties, 1966 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Autumn

“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

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1956 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Life , Hope

“…your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

“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.”

John Cheever

Quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

Family , Way

“.. for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

Dogs , Cats , Fish , Dead

“He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.”

John Cheever

Description of a Yankee rector, in The Wapshot Scandal (1964).

Money , Way

“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

“Moving Out” Esquire (June 1983).

“His religious requirements—that the service come from Cranmer’s rites in the old prayer book, that it take 33 minutes or less, that the church be within 10 minutes’ driving distance and that the altar be sufficiently simple so that it wouldn’t remind him of a gift shop—limited his choice of parishes.”

John Cheever

Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

Books

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