Quotes from Michael Chabon

The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa's idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.

Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.

One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man's life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker.

What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.

Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life.

Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what to do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be.

Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world.

he stank more than any human joe had ever smelled, as if he had been dipped in some ungodly confection of camembert and rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor.

Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. "Never worry about what you are escaping from," he said. "Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.

He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.

This is in my opinion why 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.

I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.

He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much--indeed to revolve around him--could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.

All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.

For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down.

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.

for someone or something that no one will discuss

Defiantly serving out the inhumane term of a punishment she had imposed on herself, confusing obedience with rebellion and vindication with endurance. "Come," he told her. "Put your costume

Because you know, truth is, I don't give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I'm like to want to slap somebody. I

everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he'd left the whole world to me in his will.

In my experience, Detective, it's all middle game.

The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of them related by blood, seemed to offer me the best chance yet to wire my wandering meteor to the armillary sphere of a family.

It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets.

I charge you as I was charged. Don't waste your life. Don't allow your body's weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.