# Quote — John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever

> Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.

- 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/strange-and-predatory

## More from this book

> 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.

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

> 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)