Quotes from Michael Chabon

I'm always thrilled," wrote Alan Cheuse, emphasizing the novelty and, perhaps, the faint air of slumming that attends the notion of McCarthy's move to the science-fiction neighborhood, "when a fine writer of first-class fiction takes up the genre of science fiction and matches its possibilities with his or her own powers.

We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place;

My grandfather went around to the back door. He did not care if his visit endangered the shopkeeper's life, but he wanted it to seem as though he did.

I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding.

On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Feud painting his cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.

Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain.

War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs.

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

This effort had, in fact, come to represent a necessary counterbalance to the daily trial of mere coping, a hopeful inoculation against its wasting effects.

Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head.

What kind of heaven is that, you can't have your records?

bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of my grandmother

There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark.

I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I'm not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern.

Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional

The Mittelwerk," Stolzmann repeated. His tone committed him to nothing. He might have heard of the Mittelwerk once or twice. He might just have been trying the word for the sound of it. He might have been trying to imagine what type of mittel was manufactured in this peculiar-sounding werk.

He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style.

The fathers were standing around in their baseball caps, in a knot, smoking and talking. They looked over at Kohn's van, trying to identify it. Many of them would have known each other all their lives. On this field they would have tormented the chubby, the bespectacled goat of their generation. Their sons sat clumped along the bench like pigeons on the arm of a statue.

But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives.

To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws.

adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold.

there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick.