Susan Cheever Quotes

Falling in love as we know it is an addictive experience.

Psychological studies have recently shown that adversity can be a more powerful motivator than support. Successful people often remember being told that they could not do what they have, in fact, done brilliantly. Stubbornness drove them. Their parents or teachers have told them they will never make any money, or that they will never get a college degree, or that they will never marry and have children. The urge to prove authority wrong has often spurred human beings to unusual success.

The Pilgrims believed beer was an unalloyed good, a 'good creature of God.' People who did not drink were suspect and 'crank-brained.

There is some consensus: There's obsession, there's never satiety, and there's always remorse. For me, the big thing is that you're always breaking a promise - for example, you promise yourself you're just going to have coffee with a man, then before you know it, you're in bed together.

Our [western] culture embraces sex addiction. If I drink too much or rack up credit-card debt or lose the rent in Vegas, that's bad. But if I have many lovers, that's good.

The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it's an amazing form that we haven't even begun to tap ... we're just getting started figuring out what the rules are.

The birth of a child is in many ways the end of a marriage - marriage including a child has to be reinvented, and reinvented at a time when both husband and wife are under unprecedented stress and the wife is exhausted, physically drained, and emotionally in shock. A man's conflict between wanting his child to have a mother and wanting to have the mother to himself is potentially intolerable.

Dogs are great teachers. They are at home in the world. They live in the moment, and they force us to stay there with them. Dogs love us unconditionally, not for our bodies or bank accounts.

The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.

Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

There is no such thing as expecting too much.

There is no other closeness in human life like the closeness between a mother and her baby - chronologically, physically, and spiritually they are just a few heartbeats away from being the same person.

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.

Whenever there was a crisis, I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain.

Pregnancy is difficult for women but it is even more difficult for men.

Addiction isn't about substance - you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy. Sometimes it doesn't stop there.

The CDC reported that 88,000 adults a year die of alcohol consumption.