Quotes from Michael Chabon

As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.

At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.

he lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears.

And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.

Valetta, he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer's smell of love candles and sandlewood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. Damn.

I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house.

but a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.

It was rare but not unheard of for an analysand tossed by tides of transference and desublimation to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier's doorstep or by contrast inflamed with the special hatred of counter-transference to leave herself there in some desperate condition as a cruel prank like a paper sack of dog turds set afire.

Only Aviva's long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction—the boy was trouble—and admire Titus's stillness.

Maybe I'm tired," he said. "Maybe I'm tired of picking up life in bits and fistfuls and little drawstring bags. When you get to be as old as I am, there's an appeal in the idea of seeing some business through from start to finish.

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit

When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place.

The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.

Huh-uh," Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles.

You can't walk me to school," Tommy said. He came into the kitchen, sat down before his plate, and stared at it, waiting for Sammy to pile it with eggs. "Mom, you can't possibly. I would die. I would absolutely die." "He would die," Sammy told Rosa. "Which would be very embarrassing for me," Rosa said. "Standing there next to a dead body in front of William Floyd Junior High.

writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.

On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.

A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental

In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war.

Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. The Killer Hook.

Through a determined program of sheer dumb luck and liberal applications of THC I had managed never to impregnate a woman before

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make. The Killer Hook

Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk--his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world--as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil.

Fatherhood impose[s] an obligation that [is] more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.