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The Stories of John Cheever QUOTES

The Stories of John Cheever QUOTES

1 " A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

2 " 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 , The Stories of John Cheever

3 " I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, and that he was no more free to fall in love with a strange woman he saw on a street corner than he was to take a walking trip through French Guiana or to recommence his life in Chicago under an assumed name. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

4 " 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 , The Stories of John Cheever

5 " 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 , The Stories of John Cheever

6 " 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 , The Stories of John Cheever

7 " I was here on earth because I chose to be. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

8 " All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we – you and I – shall build. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

9 " Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

10 " When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

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

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

12 " She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

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

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

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

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

15 " It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

16 " Homesickness is absolutely nothing," she said angrily. "It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. 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 , The Stories of John Cheever

17 " The moral bottom had dropped out of my world without changing a mote of sunlight. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

18 " So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of live were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions... "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

19 " She perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how cruel and frail it was, like a worn piece of burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness. "

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever

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

― John Cheever , The Stories of John Cheever