Quotes from Michael Chabon

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. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want to.

Mr. Nostalgia figured he could look it up later if he wanted to break some small, previously unbroken place in his own leaf-buried heart.

He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.

Never worry about what you're escaping from, he said. Worry about what you're escaping to.

Sammy started to pull the covers up over him. Then he stopped and just stood there looking at Tommy, loving him, and feeling the usual spasm of shame that it should be while he was watching the boy sleep that he felt most like a father, or rather, the happiest to be one.

She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same.

They were utopian, which meant they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.

The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation

As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation.

Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn't know how to do it.

Wow,' said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentary scale model of her vanished life.

It was awful luck that my pot-hobbled spermatozoa had managed to rally themselves for one last mad fallopian adventure, and that five years' worth of love, good companionship, and the exhilaration of sneaking around should come in the end to a referendum on my fitness as a father, but there it was.

His bare shoulders were ivory-yellow and densely freckled. The freckles, like his hair and eyelashes, were the color of a Nilla wafer.

But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.

amateur magician himself, he had first seen Joe performing at the St. Regis for his classmate at Horace Mann, Roy Cohn, and had been impressed enough by Joe's natural movements, his solemnity, and his flawless presentations of the Miser's Dream, Rosini's Location, and the Stabbed Deck to insist that Joe be engaged to baffle his

Bird of Wide Experience I

For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.

The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself.

my grandmother would freak you the fuck out.

The handsome Vintage Internationals edition of Nabokov's Ada, or, Ardor—an extended riff on alternate-world and time theories and a key early example in the retro-futuristic subgenre of science fiction that years later came to be known as steampunk—would look out of place in the science-fiction section, with the blue-foil lettering, the starships, the furry-faced aliens, the electron-starred vistas of cyberspace.

Sara hadn't the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man.

He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He

The elegant black-and-white ship, all 24,170 tons of it, loomed like a mountain in a dinner jacket.

To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.