John Cheever Quotes

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

— John Cheever

“There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.”

— John Cheever

“Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.”

— John Cheever

“I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.”

— John Cheever

“Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

— John Cheever

“A page of good prose remains invincible.”

— John Cheever

“Will you let me lift you?" he said. "Just let me lift you. Just let me see how light you are."
"All right," she said. "Do you want me to take off my coat?"
"Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Take off your coat."
She stood. She let her coat fall to the sofa.
"Can I do it now?" he said.
"Yes."
He put his hands under her arms. He raised her off the floor and then put her down gently. "Oh you're so light!" he shouted. "Your'e so light, you're so fragile, you don't weigh any more than a suitcase. Why, I could carry you, I could carry you anywhere, I could carry you from one end of New York to the other." He got his hat and coat and ran out of the house.”

— John Cheever

“It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.”

— John Cheever

“The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.”

— John Cheever

“Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.”

— John Cheever

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

“Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming
Diana and Helen
and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.”

— John Cheever

“I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell's Modern Europe sometime last summer.”

— John Cheever

“Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.”

— John Cheever

“Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.”

— John Cheever

“His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.”

— John Cheever

“How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?”

— John Cheever

“The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time.”

— John Cheever

“This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.”

— John Cheever

“Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten.”

— John Cheever

I did another commercial. Don't lose your loved ones, I wrote, because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium 90 in your bones. Don't be a victim of fallout. When the tart on Thirty-sixth Street gives you the big eye does your body stride off in one direction and your imagination in another? Does your mind follow her up the stairs and taste her wares in revolting detail while your flesh goes off to Brooks Brothers or the foreign exchange desk of the Chase Manhattan Bank? Haven't you noticed the size of the ferns, the lushness of the grass, the bitterness of the string beans, and the brilliant makings on the new breeds of butterflies? You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twenty-five years and only Elixircol can save you.

— John Cheever

“But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.”

— John Cheever

“Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband's lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion.”

— John Cheever

“Nils's gardens no longer bore any relationship to the needs of the house. Each spring he plowed and planted acres of vegetables and flowers. The coming up of the asparagus shoots was the signal for a hopeless race between the vegetables and Mrs. Garrison's table. Nils, embittered by the waste that he himself was the author of, came each evening to the kitchen door to tell the cook that unless they are more peas, more strawberries, more beans, more lettuce, more cabbages, the magnificent vegetables that he had watered with his sweat would rot.
- The Common Day”

— John Cheever

This is being written abord the S.S. Augustus, three days at sea. My suitcase is full of peanut butter, and I am a fugitive from the suburbs of all large cities.

— John Cheever

“Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy's old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile.”

— John Cheever

“So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle”

— John Cheever

The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant.

— John Cheever

“As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish-without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time-I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.”

— John Cheever

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.

— John Cheever

“Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and the fourth had died of delirium tremens.”

— John Cheever

“Rachel's way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate young woman is unfathomable.”

— John Cheever

“I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.”

— John Cheever

“Oh, God, you bore me this morning," my wife said.
"I've been bored for the last six years," I said.
I took a cab to the airport and an afternoon plane back to the city. We had been married twelve years and had been lovers for two years before our marriage, making a total of fourteen years in all that we had been together, and I never saw her again.”

— John Cheever

Isn't it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels.

— John Cheever

“The short story is the literature of the nomad.”

— John Cheever

“To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.”

— John Cheever

“If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.”

— John Cheever

“The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.”

— John Cheever

“The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.”

— John Cheever

“Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.”

— John Cheever

“Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.”

— John Cheever

“I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.”

— John Cheever

“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

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

— John Cheever

“The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.”

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

“My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.”

— John Cheever