Susan Cheever Quotations

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

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

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

A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.

Women's currency is their looks. Like it or not, the most powerful woman is an 18-year-old woman.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

The program of A.A., as written by Bill Wilson and Dr. Smith, only has one purpose: to get you sober. That's it. To make you a better person, forget it. That was one of the things he came to understand in those years of trial and error. It has to be about only one thing.

Womens currency is their looks. Like it or not, the most powerful woman is an 18-year-old woman.

Obsession is so extreme and so hard to imagine with the rational mind that it has a science-fiction-like quality to it-it's almost as if the obsessed one has been taken over by a replica, a pod, a facsimile of the rational person.

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

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

Personal experience is the lightning of the soul; it transforms the heart in ways that leave the brain behind.

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

If a woman is surrounded by lovers or if a woman has a lot of guys asking her out, that's considered wonderful. As a woman who's slept with a lot of men, I've always been complimented on my ability to attract men.

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

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.

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.

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.

A wedding isn't for the bride and groom, it's for the family and friends. The B. and G. are just props, silly stick figures with no more significance than the pink and white candy figures on the top of the cake.

Guilt is petty; I am above guilt.

There is no such thing as expecting too much.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think 12-step programs really work, rehab really works, certain types of therapies and talking to other addicts really work. There are a lot of things that work - that isn't the problem. The problem is getting the addicts to say they're addicts. The problem is admitting it.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

Addiction isnt about substance - you arent addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.

You mustn’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.