Quotes from Michael Chabon

The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.

The April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence - the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness - was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all.

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

Do what you gotta do and stay fly

it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.

Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot.

It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.

The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go.

She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her face.

A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.

An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left with its engine running in the middle of his brain.

He addressed the class...in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock.

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning? The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late!

A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime, I said, elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.

Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman's soul. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams.

Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.

He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.

She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.