How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
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.
At her dressing table putting on earrings. She is a pretty woman in the prime of life, and her ignorance of financial necessity is complete. Her neck is graceful, her breasts gleamed as they rose in t...
So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.
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.
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 y...
Nada le esperaba en su apartamento. No había ni una mujer, ni un hombre, ni un perro, ni un gato, y probablemente la cinta de su contestador automático estaría en blanco; además, el barrio donde vivía...
Lo que sentía por Eduardo era más parecido a la nostalgia que al espíritu aventurero del amor tradicional, pero no era un sentimiento menos fuerte. Comprendió que, si verdaderamente buscaba la pureza,...
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
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.
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...
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...
Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife.
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...
I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people.
This is being written abord the S.S. Augustus, three days at sea. My suitcase is full of peanut butter, and I am a fugitive from the suburbs of all large cities.
There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. Are you all right, darling? he asked. Yes, a woman said wearily. Yes, I'm all right, I guess, and then she added with great feeling, But yo...
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter,