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John Cheever's Journals
“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.”
“I think now of the months that I have longed to write a story that
will be fine, that will be singing, that will have in it all kinds of
lights and pleasures.”
“It was a powerfully sensual world; the smell of fires and flowers
and baking bread and peaches cooking for jam and autumn woods and spring
woods and the hallways of old houses and the noises of the rain and the
sea, of thunderstorms and the west wind. This is a red-blooded and
splendid inheritance.”
“What we take for grief or sorrow seems, often, to be our inability
to put ourselves into a viable relationship to the world; to this nearly
lost paradise.”
“So I look yearningly at the soft stars, but they will do me no
good. I think of moral crises, but when have I known the taste of
abstinence and self-discipline?”
“Oh to put it down, and to put it down with the known colors of life: the reds of courage, the yellows of love.”
“The wind slams some doors within the house, and then I smell the
rain, minutes before it begins to fall on my land. What I smell is the
damp country churches, the back hallways of houses where I was contented
and happy, privies, wet bathing suits—an odor, it seems, of joy.”
“Ski briefly into a stand of pines … I see the strength and beauty
of the copse and think that it reminds me only of a photograph of an old
woman who has written, ‘Standing among my great trees, I think of all
my loves.’”
“I think this is the very first snowfall of my long life in which I
have not been able to participate in some way. Skiing, or coasting, or
shoveling the walks. I say this to the dogs while I drink my coffee and
it is perhaps their imperturbability that leads me to ask, Whatever made
me think that I would live forever?”
John Cheever's Journals
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