Falconer Quotes

“Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the fucking plant to pieces.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. "I forgot to tell you," he said. "Liza sent us a wheel of Brie." "That's nice," she said, "but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels." He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. "That's funny," he said. "It constipates me." That was their marriage then--not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fountains, the wind in the alien olive trees, but this: a jay-naked male and female discussing their bowels.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“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 faded to a tracery of ash, whose crotch hair was sparse and gray, whose flesh hung slack on his bones, whose only trespass on life was a flat guitar and a remembered and pitiful air of "I don't know where it is, sir, but I'll find it, sir," and whose name was known nowhere, nowhere in the far reaches of the earth or in the far reaches of his memory, where, when he talked to himself, he talked to himself as Chicken Number Two.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“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.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“Farragut did not think that he was in love with himself, but once, when he got off the mattress to piss, Jody had said, "Shit, man, you're beautiful. I mean you're practically senile and there isn't much light in here, but you look very beautiful to me." Bullshit, said Farragut, but in some part of the considerable wilderness that was himself, a flower seemed to bloom and he could not find the blossom and crush it with his heel. It was a whore's line, he knew, but he seemed helplessly susceptible. It seemed that he had always known he was beautiful and had been waiting all his life to hear this said. But if in loving Jody he loved himself, there was the chance that he might, hell for leather, have become infatuated with his lost youth. Jody posed as a youth, he had the sweet breath and the sweet-smelling skin of youth, and in possessing these Farragut possessed an hour of greenness. He missed his youth, missed it as he would miss a friend, a lover, a rented house on one of the great beaches where he had been a young man. To embrace one's self, one's youth, might be easier than to love a fair woman whose nature was rooted in a past he could never comprehend. In loving Mildred, for example, he had had to learn to accommodate her taste for anchovies at breakfast, scalding bath water, tardy orgasms, and lemon-yellow wallpaper, toilet paper, bed linen, lampshades, dinner plates, table linen, upholstery and cars. She had even bought him a lemon-yellow jockstrap. To love oneself would be an idle, an impossible, but a delicious pursuit. How simple to love oneself!

And then there was to think upon the courting of death and death's dark simples, that in covering Jody's body he willingly embraced decay and corruption. To kiss a man on the throat, to gaze into a man's eyes with passion, was as unnatural as the rites and procedures in a funeral parlor; while kissing, as he had, the tight skin of Jody's belly, he might had been kissing the turf that would cover him.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“The contrite geometry of grass-cutting pleased him. To cut the grass one followed the contour of the land. To study the contour of the land—to read it as one did on skis—was to study and read the contour of the neighborhood, the county, the state, the continent, the planet, and to study and read the contour of the planet was to study and read the nature of its winds as his old father had done, sailing catboats and kites. Some oneness was involved, some contentment.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“There was still a little light in the window. Dance music came from Ransome's radio and at the end of the corridor on TV he could see a group of people having trouble. An old man was intoxicated with the past. A young man was intoxicated with the future. There was a young woman who had trouble with her lovers and an old woman who could be seen hiding gin bottles in hatboxes, refrigerators and bureau drawers. Out of the window beyond their heads and shoulders Farragut could see waves breaking on a white beach and the streets of a village and the trees of a forest, but why did they all stay in one room, quarreling, when they could walk to the store or eat a picnic in the woods or go for a swim in the sea? They were free to do all of this. Why did they stay indoors? Why didn't they hear the sea calling to them as Farragut heard it calling, imagined the clearness of the brine as it fanned out over the beautiful pebbles?”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“What I’m trying to say is that I ain’t learned all I know through experience. I ain’t learned through experience at all. I like you and I don’t like the Cuckold and it’s that way all down the line and so I figure I must come into this life with the memories of some other life and so it stands that I’ll be going into something else and you know what, Zeke, you know what, I can hardly wait to see what it’s going to be like, I can hardly wait.”
― John Cheever, Falconer

“The Farraguts were the sort of people who claimed to be sustained by tradition, but who were in fact sustained by the much more robust pursuit of a workable improvisation, uninhibited by consistency.”
― John Cheever, Falconer