Quotes from Michael Chabon

The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.

Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises.

She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.

It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonders, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green.

A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

You would never do anything like that, would you? my wife asked him. You would never hurt animals. Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge of his belief system, composed of equal parts off-kilter Far Side animal-centrism and a dark Captain Nemoesque contempt for humanity, inclined me to think he was telling the truth. Gigantic fish pulling the limbs from cruel little boys, that might be something you could get him to sign on for.

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

She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned.

You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus.

This was the writer's true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work -- Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver -- whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life's very course.

He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole. From the way she seemed to relish the word asshole as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, and I was momentarily very jealous of Arthur. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.

He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman's lack of faith.

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That's another way of saying it was all I had.

See you in the funny papers, he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.

A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.

The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?

It holds my essential stuff, including a book—for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[…]

The evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature.

I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.

As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.