# Quote — John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever

> Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.

- 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/wisdom-we-know

## 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)