John Cheever Quotes

1912 – 1982

American novelist and short-story writer.

20 quotesAbout John Cheever on Wikipedia

“Art is the triumph over chaos.”

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

“One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief.”

— John Cheever

“The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty.”

— John Cheever

“We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.”

— John Cheever

“People named John and Mary never divorce.”

— John Cheever

“Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”

— John Cheever

“It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos.”

— John Cheever

“Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.”

— John Cheever

“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

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

— John Cheever

“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

“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

“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…”

— 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…”

— John Cheever

“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…”

— John Cheever