# Quote — John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever

> At my back I hear the word—”homosexual”—and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.

- Author: [John Cheever](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-cheever.md)
- Book: [The Journals of John Cheever](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-cheever/the-journals-of-john-cheever.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Cheever#The_Journals_of_John_Cheever_(1991)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-cheever/the-journals-of-john-cheever/at-my-back

## More from this book

> The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-cheever/the-journals-of-john-cheever/the-organizations-of-men.md)

> The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-cheever/the-journals-of-john-cheever/the-task-of-an-american.md)

> People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-cheever/the-journals-of-john-cheever/people-named-john.md)