John Cheever Quotes
I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.
Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.
I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people.
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.
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.
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.