Art is the triumph over chaos.

—John Cheever

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About John Cheever

Portrait of John Cheever

John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South...

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We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. . . . We amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

—John Cheever

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I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

—John Cheever

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If my hands tremble with desire, they tremble likewise when I reach for the chalice on Sunday, and if lust makes me run and caper, it is no stronger a force than that which brings me to my knees to say thanksgivings and litanies. What can this capricious skin be but a blessing?

—John Cheever

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More quotations tagged with “chaos”

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

—Jerry Garcia

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A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves.

—Chögyam Trungpa in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

—Theodor W. Adorno

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Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

—Melody Beattie

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And this is the simple truth — that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

—Soren Kierkegaard

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truth life ideas tragedy clinging chaos salvation being lost

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