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

“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.”