Quotes from Michael Chabon

As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?

And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.

Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men.

Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum

The handy thing about being a father is that the historical standard is so pitifully low.

Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.

He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people's bad decisions along with his own.

The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.

That's why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in life, keep track of my errors.

Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union: Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.

His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

Zugzwang. It's when you have no good moves. But you still have to move.

He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.

The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.

she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.

because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second. I

the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.

I don't look stoned?" My heart began to pound. The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight—and if possible operate complicated machinery—while immense shrieking nebulae are coming asunder in his brain. To fail at this—to be found out—carries a mysterious burden of anxiety and shame. "How are my eyes?

Thus while claiming, on the one hand, a dubiously ahistorical, archetypical source for the superhero idea in the Jungian vastness of legend, we dissolve its true universality in a foaming bath of periodized explanations, and render the superhero and his costume a time-fixed idea that is always already going out of fashion.

Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He

The other fellow was more of a fireplug, broad in the chest and shoulders, with a wide pugnacious face and the hint of a shadow even on his freshly shaved jaw. He always looked as if he had not dressed for work that morning so much as gotten into some kind of altercation with his suit, shirt, and tie.

just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.

I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.