Quotes from Michael Chabon

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

I don't know if I went quite that far in my thinking." "But now?" "Now I don't think about it." "Yeah, I know." "You don't approve. You think I should just keep dredging it all up all the time." "Not all the time. Just, like, every ten years or so.

It turned out that the V-2 was not a means to liberate the human spirit from the chains of gravity; it was only a pretext for further enchainment.

When she caught him staring, he would even more artlessly look down at the food on his plate with a show of puzzlement, as if he kept forgetting what supper was and how it was supposed to work.

She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home.

They feed on the meat of this remark, gauging its flavor and vitamin content.

Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes.

all I want to do is get home and never see any of you authors ever again

I guess I don't fit the new corporate profile." "Which is?" "Competence.

I told you, hon, I'm not a real person. This is my job.

It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weightless and drifting.

When were they happy? In the cracks? I said. In the cracks.

Superheroes spend a lot of time wishing they could just stay home, spend time with their families and loved ones, date the girl they love, be like everybody else.

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. 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.

It was just an old clock, your honor," he told Smith, looking at once relieved and disappointed. "In the desk of a Mister Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Clay. Taped to a couple of dowels painted red." "I knew it," said Joe softly, starting in on the second little box. "Dynamite isn't even red," the old fireman said, walking off. "Not really." "The guy reads too much comic books," Joe said.

At any rate, as Uncle Ray once explained to him, if you examined the language, the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.

The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.

A father is a man who fails every day.

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.

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...

Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention.

It was like that with Rosa now. He spent all of his time squelching his thoughts, tamping down his feelings. There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw.

acromegaly. Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a neurologist

An excess of the desire to appear grown up is one of the defining characteristics of adolescence.