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“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
#Sorry #Fog #Essence
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“It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.”
-- John Cheever
#Summer #Morning #Splendid
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“For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.”
-- John Cheever
#Rain #Men #Intelligent
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“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
#Lonely #Being Alone #Autumn
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“I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.”
-- John Cheever
#Writing #Kissing #Reader
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“There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.”
-- John Cheever
#Alcohol #Metaphor #Terrible
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“Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.”
-- John Cheever
#Fiction #Experimentation
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“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
-- John Cheever
#Inspirational #Country #Travel
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“Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.”
-- John Cheever
#Knives #House #Taste
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“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
#Despair #World #Literature
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“Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . 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
#Country #Long #People
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“Art is the triumph over chaos.”
-- John Cheever
#Art #Triumph #Chaos
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“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
#Cancer #Mean #Cat
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“When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.”
-- John Cheever
#Family #Leaving #Remember
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“You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.”
-- John Cheever
#Speech #Communicate #Bores
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“Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.”
-- John Cheever
#Writing #Ego #Promise
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“Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.”
-- John Cheever
#Two #Evil #Good And Evil
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“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
#Dream #Art #Lying
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“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.”
-- John Cheever
#Writing #Needs #Make Sense
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“All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.”
-- John Cheever
#Men #Yankees #Fans
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“Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”
-- John Cheever
#Kings #Dark #Night
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“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
#Grief #Rain #Writing
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“The short story is the literature of the nomad.”
-- John Cheever
#Stories #Literature #Short Story
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“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
#Different #Body #Lovers
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“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
#Rain #Taken #Light
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“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
#New York #Loss #Cities
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“The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.”
-- John Cheever
#Children #Philosophy #Book
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“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.”
-- John Cheever
#Men #Records #Longing
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“When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”
-- John Cheever
#Heart #Self #Sand
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“People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.”
-- John Cheever
#Philosophy #People #Confusion
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