Quotes from Michael Chabon

He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.

I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone. "How

ha pedig meg lehet menteni, akkor még jobban elcseszni is lehet.

To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he

The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood—sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire.

Can you imagine an infinite tree?...A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything?...if you've ever looked at a tree you've seen how its trunk divides into boughs, which divide yet again to branches, which divide into twigs, which divide again into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket.

Gibson Goode to Archy: You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.

It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids.

the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

There was nothing a man couldn't do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres. The car was called an El Camino for a reason. (Telegraph Avenue, p399)

Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget..

One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.

Sammy performed the rapid series of operations - which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops - that passed, in his mother's kitchen, for eating.

There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent.

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.

You read my Cosmo? I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions. How did I do? You cheated, I said.

Even the most casual study of the record...would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.

He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.

I DRANK FOR YEARS, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There's something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties.

Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she's black. And look I mean you're aware of my policy when it comes to that kind of situation. Your policy is 'What do I know about being black?' What do I know about being black?...

I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.

Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it.

The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.