Quotes from Michael Chabon

She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work.

Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story.

I'd wanted to work in a true, old-fashioned bookshop, crammed with the mingled smells of literature and Pittsburgh blowing in through the open door. Instead I'd got myself hired by Boardwalk Books.

But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn't count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father

Silence then, ominous, neither heavy nor light, the vast silence of a dirigible before the static spark.

But what if he's lost?" my grandmother said for the thousandth or millionth time. "He isn't lost," Uncle Ray said, issuing the finding that ultimately prevailed in the family Talmud. "He knows where he is.

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood Normal Time in New California Writing

I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats

When she first saw him, standing at the threshold of the reception room, contemplating departure before he had even arrived, she thought he had an American face, an American body. Buick shoulders, bulldozer jaw. Only if you considered his eyes would you be forced to conclude, and she did conclude, that he was beautiful.

The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?

He could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

I was to spend the daytime summer stunned by air-conditioning, almost without a thought in my head, waiting for the engagement of evening.

Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass.

As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

stories make life so much better.

His heart smack[ed] against his ribs like a bumblebee at a window.

His illusions about American decency had not survived the reading of American history.

You mendacious sons of bitches," the mahout said

a momentary gain in one's own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-hearted glee;

Kun katson nyt Challengerin miehistön kuvaa, en näe seitsemää hymyilijää, kaunista Judy Resnickiä enkä oikeastaan edes pienoismallia sinänsä. Näen vain piilotetut rakastavaiset, joiden kohtalot ovat kietoutuneet toisiinsa kuin heidän vartalonsa ja jotka odottavat kiihkeästi vapautuvansa painovoimasta, joka on aina pitänyt heidät maassa.

Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.

the greater involution and deeper patina of her left tooth in comparison to the right, the skeptical cast

it was not a confidence in his own abilities that seemed to direct Tracy Bacon so much as an assuredness of being welcome wherever he went. He was golden and beautiful