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c003b02
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Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos... to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
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fiction
writing
books
inspirational
on-fiction
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John Cheever |
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c964aea
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She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.
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John Cheever |
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a7c28bf
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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John Cheever |
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96b8c6b
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Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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John Cheever |
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f3bcc0e
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I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
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John Cheever |
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ce1c5e2
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Will you let me lift you?" he said. "Just let me lift you. Just let me see how light you are." "All right," she said. "Do you want me to take off my coat?" "Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Take off your coat." She stood. She let her coat fall to the sofa. "Can I do it now?" he said. "Yes." He put his hands under her arms. He raised her off the floor and then put her down gently. "Oh you're so light!" he shouted. "Your'e so light, you're so fragi..
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John Cheever |
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287ecec
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It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, "I drank too much last night."
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sunday
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John Cheever |
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5c134f1
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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."
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John Cheever |
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05effe8
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To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.
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John Cheever |
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cb3931e
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The moral bottom had dropped out of my world without changing a mote of sunlight.
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John Cheever |
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615ee01
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So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of live were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions...
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John Cheever |
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9e82ed1
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Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimmi..
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John Cheever |
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3baeb93
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She perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how cruel and frail it was, like a worn piece of burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness.
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John Cheever |
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2900e01
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How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
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John Cheever |
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dcf3ae7
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Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. 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.
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travel
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John Cheever |
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6edb32d
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I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell's sometime last summer.
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John Cheever |
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a70d6f8
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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."
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John Cheever |
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284607e
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The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.
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John Cheever |
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86af6cb
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His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.
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John Cheever |
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15c0a59
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She came right up to me and put her snow-white hand on my arm. "You poor boy," she murmured, "you poor boy." I'm not a boy, and I'm not poor, and I wished the hell she would get away. She has a clever face, but I felt in it, that night, the force of a great sadness and great malice. "I see a rope around your neck," she said sadly."
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John Cheever |
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36fc09e
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The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time.
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John Cheever |
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9b93409
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Agnes Shay had the true spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and mild eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in back passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants' halls that remind one of a prison, her soul had grown docile and bleak...Agnes loved the ceremonies of a big house. She drew the curtains in the living room at dark, lighted the candles on the table, and struck the dinner chimes like..
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John Cheever |
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96d1adc
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He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.
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John Cheever |
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734adcb
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In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it.
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John Cheever |
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cbfcfef
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The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began.
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John Cheever |
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c1683fc
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He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. "I forgot to tell you," he said. "Liza sent us a wheel of Brie." "That's nice," she said, "but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels." He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. "That's funny," he said. "It constipates me." That was their marriage then--not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fount..
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marriage
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John Cheever |
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ecec936
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Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.
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John Cheever |
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d1bbfec
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It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
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summer
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John Cheever |
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6823309
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I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.
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John Cheever |
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3c4ce75
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Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stair, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old house seem fitting and urgent, why did the first watery note..
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John Cheever |
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d3b0bfb
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This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir--even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?
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prison
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John Cheever |
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d0240cb
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The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts--although they seldom mentioned this to anyone--and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio. Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio--or of any of the other applianc..
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John Cheever |
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43116c6
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the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man..
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John Cheever |
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202dd4e
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Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos had faded to a tracery of ash, whose crotch hair was sparse and gray, whose flesh hung slack on his bones, whose only trespass on life was a flat guitar and a remembered and pitiful air of "I don't know where it is, sir, but I'll find it, sir," and..
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John Cheever |
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7df38a8
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She was his potchke, his fleutchke, his notchke, his motchke, his everything that the speech of St. Botolphs left unexpressed. She was his little, little squirrel.
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John Cheever |
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ed04144
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For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.
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John Cheever |
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0a08cb9
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we obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us.
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John Cheever |
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986ece0
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These napkins are more holy than righteous," Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns."
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hoary-puns
napkins
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John Cheever |
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12559d8
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But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.
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John Cheever |
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6fa51f2
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Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?
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John Cheever |
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502cb88
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I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.
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writing
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John Cheever |
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f231f7f
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They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets.
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John Cheever |
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a55ad2c
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This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
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John Cheever |
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a54479f
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I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; to celebrate life is..
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earth
journals
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John Cheever |