Quotes from Michael Chabon

It's a sinking ship, he said. You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard.

and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.

Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go.

He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch, as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbarian horde mounted its conquering ponies.

Across the feral golf course on the other side of the fence, a million insects played a one-note tone poem entitled Heat.

bright men in narrow neckties and short haircuts whose terrible optimism made the sixties such an admirable and disappointing time.

Vulgar language, Chan said...Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.

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.

Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.

Chabon's success can be traced back to three requirements: talent, luck, and discipline. "Discipline," he says, "is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Do you think they were ever happy? Definitely, I said. Definitely? For sure. She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn't have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business. When were they happy? In the cracks? I said. In the cracks. Yeah.

But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.

Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a

We figure he must have let him out. The perpetrator, I mean. He's blind and we figure he just wandered off and maybe got run over. The perpetrator. No, the dog.

Wie viele einsame Kinder war sein Problem nicht die Einsamkeit an sich, sondern dass er nie allein gelassen wurde, um sie zu geniessen.

Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Although in the past I had seen a few exchanges of genuine affection between them, the Warshaw men were awkward and ill at ease with each other.

At any rate it is impossible to live intelligently as a member of a minority group in a nation that was founded every bit as firmly on enslavement and butchery as on ideals of liberty and brotherhood and not feel, at least every once in a while, that you can no more take for granted the continued tolerance of your existence here than you ought take the prosperity or freedom you enjoy.

My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of herself? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the truth. Maybe self was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe very time you met her, she would be somebody else.

My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.

Always true to the code," she said.

It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I'd fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.

You hope to spend your life doing what you love and need and have been fitted by nature or God or your protein-package to do: write, draw, sing, tell stories. But you have to eat.