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2b7eba9
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I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
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John Cheever |
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cc4544c
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I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed.
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John Cheever |
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2c3db24
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A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate.
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John Cheever |
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5ea4ebc
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All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are..
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civilization
ruins
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John Cheever |
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d52d75d
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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.
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John Cheever |
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72386e9
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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.
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John Cheever |
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604058b
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It is unlikely that Percy would have written my mother after her return from Europe, and, had she written, the letter would have been destroyed, since that family had a crusading detestation of souvenirs. Letters, photographs, diplomas--anything that authenticated the past was always thrown into the fire.
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John Cheever |
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c9e25d3
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Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife.
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John Cheever |
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67e382b
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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."
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John Cheever |
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855f35f
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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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John Cheever |
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328cf7c
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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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solitude
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John Cheever |
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bcd15db
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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 |
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7dba29e
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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 |
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c032694
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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 |
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0698a87
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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 |
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0be6bf4
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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 wh..
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John Cheever |
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50779dd
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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 |
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2b513b2
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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 |
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bece39a
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Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.
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sinner
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John Cheever |
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8f8351f
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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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new-england
small-town
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John Cheever |
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16a326a
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Sentado en la terraza, leo sobre los sufrimientos de Scott Fitzgerald.[122] Yo soy, el fue, de los que leen las dolorosas historias de los escritores alcoholicos y autodestructivos con el vaso de whisky en la mano y las lagrimas rodando por las mejillas.[123]
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John Cheever |
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54f10b6
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Homesickness is nothing ... Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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John Cheever |
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446001b
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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John Cheever |
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10e5445
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss--you can't do it alone.
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John Cheever |
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197983b
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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John Cheever |
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302145e
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All literary men are Red Sox fans--to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
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John Cheever |
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3968776
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Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
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John Cheever |
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8a20462
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When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
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John Cheever |
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b5a0dab
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I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
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John Cheever |
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f01d5ed
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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.
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John Cheever |