At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.
John CheeverFor 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 CheeverAvoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John CheeverWisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
John CheeverMy God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.
John Cheever