Quotes from Michael Chabon

Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats

It was the very color of the way my grandmother smelled; the color of the warmth of her lap and enfolding arms; the color of her husky voice resounding in her rib cage when she pulled me close.

This is our life happening... and it's happening right now.

but he did recognize Raymond Scott, a composer who had recently hit it big with a series of whimsical, cacophonous, breakneck pseudo-jazz pop tunes.

The hair on the back of the neck stood erect and you ran, in spite of yourself, ribs ringing with panic, certain as a child running up the cellar stairs that something very bad was after you.

that fifty percent of a person's medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life.

His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.

I have a boyfriend now. A real one. We're totally dating, it's very strange.

When she found herself alone in the house, she had a record of Highland reels and marches that she played very loud, because for unknown reasons the sound of bagpipes kept the creature at bay.

First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah.

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.

The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.

The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave

She had more work to do on the class-action suit, but she was taking a break to knit a stocking cap for her father, who often complained that his head felt cold. When she was through, it would have gold and crimson stripes and a green pom-pom. It was not the kind of hat anybody would want to die in, but maybe that was the point.

For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.

The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven brothers and a widowed father, had every been obliged to inhale. It hung in the room as thick as sheepshearing and made arabesques in the harsh slanting light from the window.

The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details.

I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat.

The African patted the horse's neck and spoke to it in a velvet language, and Hanukkah caught sight of the broad ax slung across the giant's back and began to regret his decision to call attention to himself, because kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality

They're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.

The wind of righteous adventure that had begun to sweep through the square subsided as this secret captain and master of the accumulated lore of soldierly skepticism began to explain that any king who controlled both the treasury and the army was, in the eyes of the world, legitimate, and that while no one could know the mind of God, the Almighty had in the past shown a marked tendency, in his view, to ratify public opinion.

Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect.

A few flames crackled here and there along the nubs that once were branches. Then they flickered out, too, leaving smoke, a whistle of steam, and a light snowfall of ashes.