Quotes from Michael Chabon

My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.

Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather's view: to render memory unnecessary.

Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.

Love is like falconry, he said. Don't you think that's true, Cleveland? Never say love is like anything. said Cleveland. It isn't.

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.

And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.

I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver's head. 'Hey, bus driver,' I said. 'Can I smoke?' 'May I,' said the bus driver. 'I love you,' I said.

Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.

It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved

Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

That's a big trunk, James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly. That's just what they used to say in the ads, I said...

When he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts.

Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.

She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.

Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.

He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball, Peavine's book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time