John Cheever Quotes

John Cheever delivers blunt, funny, and cynical musings that pull you into quirky takes on life, faith, and power.

18 quotes

1. '...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.'

2. '..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.'

3. 'Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.'

4. '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.'

5. '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.'

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

7. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

8. 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.

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

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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

16. Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

17. Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

18. People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.