“Farragut's first visitor was his wife. He was raking leaves in yard Y when the PA said that 734-508-32 had a visitor. He jogged up the road past the firehouse and into the tunnel. It was four flights up to cellblock F. "Visitor," he said to Walton, who let him into his cell. He kept his white shirt prepared for visits. It was dusty. He washed his face and combed his hair with water. "Don't take nuttin but a handkerchief," said the guard. "I know, I know, I know...." Down he went to the door of the visitor's room, where he was frisked. Through the glass he saw that his visitor was Marcia.There were no bars in the visitor's room, but the glass windows were chicken-wired and open only at the top. A skinny cat couldn't get in or out, but the sounds of the prison moved in freely on the breeze. She would, he knew, have passed three sets of bars - clang, clang, clang - and waited in an anteroom where there were pews or benches, soft-drink engines and a display of the convict's art with prices stuck in the frames. None of the cons could paint, but you could always count on some wet-brain to buy a vase of roses or a marine sunset if he had been told that the artist was a lifer. There were no pictures on the walls of the visitor's room but there were four signs that said: NO SMOKING, NO WRITING, NO EXCHANGE OF OBJECTS, VISITORS ARE ALLOWED ONE KISS.”

“I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey”

“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.”

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

“When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people.”

“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 a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.”

“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 the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we – you and I – shall build.”

“I was here on earth because I chose to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”