Life & Wisdom Quote by John Cheever

Cheever takes a feeling people treat like a private ailment and flips it into a demographic fact. “Homesickness is nothing” isn’t denial; it’s a cold splash of scale. By claiming “Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time,” he turns longing into background radiation - not a dramatic episode, but a permanent condition of modern life.

The move is slyly consoling and quietly brutal. Consoling because it de-exceptionalizes your ache: you’re not uniquely broken, you’re statistically ordinary. Brutal because it implies there may be no cure. If half the world is “homesick all the time,” then “home” stops being a place you can simply return to. It becomes an idea that keeps receding, like the version of yourself you were before you left, or before life rearranged the furniture.

Cheever’s own terrain - the mid-century American suburbs, cocktail-hour manners, the shimmering surfaces that hide loneliness - is built for this sentiment. His characters often live in the right house but feel exiled inside it. The line also carries an immigrant-country logic: people are always moving, upward or outward, socially or geographically, and the price of that motion is a low-grade grief we learn to call normal.

The intent isn’t to minimize homesickness; it’s to expose how thoroughly it’s been normalized. Cheever makes the personal symptom read like a cultural diagnosis: a world organized around restlessness will mass-produce people who miss a home they can’t quite name.