Quotes from Michael Chabon

Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.

I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather's estate, that fifty percent of a person's medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather's history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.

Irv had rediscovered, as surprisingly few men do, that the secret to perfect male happiness is a well-equipped clubhouse.

In Egypt, in Shushan, in the time of Judah Maccabee, God had intervened to deliver us with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; big deal. When we were sent to the ovens, God had sat with His outstretched thumb up His mighty ass and let us burn.

Tommy had never been successful at explaining himself to adults because of their calamitous heedlessness

He was going to the synagogue that afternoon because Uncle Ray had assured him that my grandmother would be there, and my grandfather was hoping to get into my grandmother's panties. The woman had passed through the fire without being consumed, but she had, my grandfather understood, been damaged. So he had decided that he was going to save her. Getting into her panties was a necessary first step.

Le facce dei bambini erano stupite, esitanti. Il lento, triste, oscuro sottomarino che trasportava il carico delle loro vite, era improvvisamente emerso in superficie. Nel loro sangue ora circolava disordinatamente l'azoto della meraviglia. Nessuno rideva o sorrideva, ma si sa che quando si divertono davvero, i bambini sono sempre seri.

The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.

From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He thought that if he took on the job of loving this broken woman, some measure of sense or purpose might be returned to his life. He thought that in mending her, he might also be mended.

The woman he met at the Waxmans' that second evening seemed heavy at her core, subject to some crushing gravity. She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack.

Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.

Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit...

man makes plans. God laughs

that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.

So you were going to shoot him," Dick says. "That's some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh?

I smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Joe learned to view the comic book hero in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier Clay; Joe's work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats.

My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

What I came to dislike about Little League that spring was not the regulation per se, or the fathers--whose consciousness had generally been raised at least a little bit--or the tedium, or the low quality of play, or the pain of watching my son strike out a lot. It was the way I got reminded, every game, that this was the world my children lived in: the world in which the wild watershed of childhood had been brought fully under control of the adult Corps of Engineers.

they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY? And, lower: HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES Then: PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD A fourth man had concluded: AND OF EVERYTHING THAT'S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES

you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out. He headed up into Woodberry

People notice only what you tell them to notice," he said. "And then only if you remind them.

Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.