Trace listened to the story, but how could he get excited? Francis had no powers that would let him re-create a brush with death – particularly in the atmosphere of a commuting train, journeying through a sunny countryside where already, in the slum gardens, there were signs of harvest.

— John Cheever

John Cheever Quotes

The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming – Diana and Helen – and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

— John Cheever

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.

— John Cheever

The novel remains for me one of the few forms... where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

— John Cheever

Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?

— John Cheever

Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer – with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook – arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers – travelers, at least, with a traveler’s acuteness of feeling.” – from ““The Seaside Houses.

— John Cheever

He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one.

— John Cheever

Justina’s life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.

— John Cheever

The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant.

— John Cheever

Like most incurable fibbers, she had an extravagant regard for the truth, which she expressed by sending up signals meant to indicate that she was lying.

— John Cheever

You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.

— John Cheever

And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people’s contentment and vitality. It seems comical – farcical – that, having been treated so generously, I should be struck with this image of a kid in the rain walking along the road shoulders of East Milton.

— John Cheever

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 a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.

— John Cheever

Donald Wryson was a large man with thinning fair hair and the cheerful air of a bully, but he was a bully only in the defense of rectitude, class distinctions, and the orderly appearance of things.

— John Cheever

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.

— John Cheever

Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over.

— 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.

— John Cheever

We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another... Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.

— John Cheever

One not only writes a book. One lives it. Upon completing it there are certain symptoms of death.

— John Cheever

I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.

— John Cheever

He has done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupified with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague.

— John Cheever
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