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Author: John Cheever
Quotes of Author: John Cheever

John Cheever _ Diarios
Sentado en la terraza, leo sobre los sufrimientos de Scott Fitzgerald.{122} Yo soy, él fue, de los que leen las dolorosas historias de los escritores alcohólicos y autodestructivos con el vaso de whisky en la mano y las lágrimas rodando por las mejillas.{123}
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John Cheever _ Oh What a Paradise It Seems
Another historical peculiarity of the place was the fact that its large mansions, those relics of another time, had not been reconstructed to serve as nursing homes for that vast population of comatose and the dying who were kept alive, unconscionably, through trailblazing medical invention."
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John Cheever _ The Stories of John Cheever
Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of John Cheever
Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail
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John Cheever _ The Stories of 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.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of John Cheever
If there was anything really wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library – no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage; no broken sets of Dostoevski and George Eliot; no Galsworthy, even; no Barrie and no Bennett. This was the chief concern of the Village Council during Marcie's term. The library partisans were mostly newcomers to the village; the opposition whip was Mrs Selfredge, a member of the Council and a very decorous woman, with blue eyes of astonishing brilliance and inexpressiveness. Mrs Selfredge often spoke of the chosen quietness of their life. 'We never go out,' she would say, but in such a way that she seemed to be expressing not some choice but a deep vein of loneliness. She was married to a wealthy man much older than herself, and they had no children; indeed, the most indirect mention of sexual fact brought a deep color to Mrs Selfredge's face. She took the position that a library belonged in that category of public service that might make Shady Hill attractive to a development. This was not blind prejudice. Carsen Park, the next village, had let a development inside its boundaries, with disastrous results to the people already living there. Their taxes had been doubled, their schools had been ruined. That there was any connection between reading and real estate was disputed by the partisans of the library, until a horrible murder – three murders, in fact – took place in one of the cheese-box houses in the Carsen Park development, and the library project was buried with the victims.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of John Cheever
Among the rewards of his expatriation were a heightened awareness of what he saw and an exhilarating sense of freedom. 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 wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of John Cheever
What I did not understand, as I walked down Fifth Avenue that afternoon, was how a world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of 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.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of John Cheever
The study of Euclid put him into a compassionate and tranquil frame of mind, and illuminated, among other things, that his thinking and feeling had recently been crippled by confusion and despair.
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John Cheever _ The Stories of 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.
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John Cheever _ The Journals of 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.
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