Quotes from Michael Chabon

Badass.' My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.

Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.

A Coyote game of paths and chances.

there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law's counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen.

Under the circumstances, skepticism had felt like a kind of madness; to choose belief was the only way forward.

hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.

Sarát levetkÅ'ztetni gátlástalan cselekedet volt, szinte vandalizmus, mint szabadon ereszteni egy állatkert lakóit vagy felrobbantani egy gátat.

It was a marvelous idea, and he backed away from it, giving it space; you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out.

All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men.

an ancient woman, swarthy and whiskered and crooked like a finger.

Midwives' experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer's knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds.

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!

If your wife, your brother, or God forbid, your child dies, it leaves a big hole in your life. It's much better not to pretend there's no hole. Not to try to, what do they say nowadays, get over it ... when it's time for the Kaddish. You stand up in front of everybody, and you point to the hole, and you say, 'Look at this. This is what I'm living with, this hole.' Eleven months, every week. It doesn't go away, you don't put it behind you.

grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For

Take care—there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

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

burned off their mutual contempt by abusing the counter help. My

Fighting it the way a salmon fights against the current of the river in which it's going to die. Like a salmon --- that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home.

You have a decision to make and right now too little information for making it." By chance or instinct, she had hit on the type of reasoning that could move my grandfather

At least he kept trying to express himself, his real self, as motley and inchoate for now as the outfit he was wearing. And maybe that was part of the purpose of middle school: to give you something to work against, to press upon, as you attempted to fashion a self from the lump of contradictory impulses and emotions and paradigms that your mind and your culture presented.

You hit me with a tuba," he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry." A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my

If I could work without the pants on," he said, "I would go naked.

Oops, the moth woman mumbles

He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. "Just watch me," he said.