171 Quotes by 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.

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.

Homesickness is absolutely nothing,” she said angrily. “It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. 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.

There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two – a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.

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.

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.

I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.

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

It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. “How far that little candle throws its beams,” she exclaimed. “So shines a good dead in a naughty world.