Top 100 John Cheever Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never been, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.”

— John Cheever

2. “The short story is the literature of the nomad.”

— John Cheever

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “Art is the triumph over chaos.”

— John Cheever

4. “The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.”

— John Cheever

5. “Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”

— John Cheever

6. “When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”

— John Cheever

7. “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss – you can’t do it alone.”

— John Cheever

8. “For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.”

— John Cheever

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “All literary men are Red Sox fans – to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.”

— John Cheever

10. “Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil – not the strength to choose between the two.”

— John Cheever

11. “There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.”

— John Cheever

12. “A page of good prose remains invincible.”

— John Cheever

13. “The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.”

— John Cheever

14. “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.”

— John Cheever

15. “The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.”

— John Cheever

16. “The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.”

— John Cheever

17. “Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman.”

— John Cheever

18. “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

— John Cheever

19. “A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.”

— John Cheever

20. “The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.”

— John Cheever

21. “If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.”

— John Cheever

22. “Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.”

— John Cheever

23. “Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.”

— John Cheever

24. “I have always been the lover – never the beloved – and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.”

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

26. “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.”

— John Cheever

27. “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

28. “My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.”

— John Cheever

29. “I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.”

— John Cheever

30. “That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.”

— John Cheever

31. “I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.”

— John Cheever

32. “I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views.”

— John Cheever

33. “For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.”

— John Cheever

34. “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

35. “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.”

— John Cheever

36. “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?”

— John Cheever

37. “It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.”

— John Cheever

38. “You can’t expect to communicate with anyone if you’re a bore.”

— John Cheever

39. “The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”

— John Cheever

40. “Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.”

— John Cheever

41. “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

42. “It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.”

— John Cheever

43. “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.”

— John Cheever

Featured in: Reading Quotes

44. “When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.”

— John Cheever

45. “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?”

— John Cheever

46. “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

47. “To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.”

— John Cheever

48. “Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.”

— John Cheever

49. “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

50. “The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.”

— John Cheever