Quotes from Michael Chabon

my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.

breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the poor fellow's pulse. While he worked, he asked about the

Maybe God doesn't want this tower," my grandmother theorized. She was standing in the middle of the living room, holding my grandfather's coat and briefcase and the crumpled mess of his newspaper. "Because from the top of it, people they can look inside of His house and see He is a big pork.

He doesn't just fight it. He frees the world of it. He frees people, see?

Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.

man coming toward him over the ice, watching

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef - flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments.

The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trenchermen would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither the God not the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires.

silence was darkness, and that naming shone a light.

From the time he'd moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot.

Don't worry about him, she would say, that's how he is—every time we start an argument I end up with a monologue. Or Some husbands take lovers, mine he take the Fifth.

Paper." "What kind of paper? What for?" "A letter." "Business? Personal? This is for you? You're going to write a letter?" "Yes, sir." "Well, what kind of a letter is it?" Tommy considered the question for a moment, seriously. He didn't want to get the wrong kind of paper. "A death threat," he said at last.

My grandfather was seventy-three. Over the course of his life, the definition and requirements of manhood had been subject to upheaval and reform. Like the electoral laws of his adopted home state, the end result was a mess.

It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal.

the demon virtues — patience, deception, quick hands, craftiness, an for the mistakes of others

THE CHOICE, BY BOTH PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELI JEWS, TO TRUST ONE another is perilous. Day after day, the mechanisms of life under occupation succeed in their aim: to disavow the possibility of commonality and coexistence. There

Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence.

But those activities were a front, as Brennan showed, for Hertz's real agenda: to obtain Permanent Status for the District: P.S., or even, in his wildest dreams, statehood.

The special-order French bees were prey to wanderlust and ennui. But

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all.

It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.

They fell asleep holding each other and were wakened by a smell, comforting and maternal, of boiled milk and salt water.

explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them.