Top 100 Michael Chabon Quotes
#1. I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.
Michael Chabon
#2. I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility.
Michael Chabon
#3. Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away.
Landsman looks away.
Michael Chabon
#4. 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.
Michael Chabon
#5. 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.
Michael Chabon
#6. This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
Michael Chabon
#7. She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home.
Michael Chabon
#8. You read my Cosmo?"
"I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions."
"How did I do?"
"You cheated," I said.
Michael Chabon
#9. 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.
Michael Chabon
#10. I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.
Michael Chabon
#11. Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America's ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.
Michael Chabon
#12. The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.
Michael Chabon
#13. In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war.
Michael Chabon
#14. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
Michael Chabon
#15. When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.
Michael Chabon
#16. It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well.
Michael Chabon
#17. All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe.
Michael Chabon
#18. Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
Michael Chabon
#19. She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.
Michael Chabon
#20. 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.
Michael Chabon
#21. When he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts.
Michael Chabon
#22. Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
Michael Chabon
#23. The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
Michael Chabon
#24. the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.
Michael Chabon
#25. Sara hadn't the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man.
Michael Chabon
#26. The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go.
Michael Chabon
#27. grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For
Michael Chabon
#28. So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.
Michael Chabon
#29. My story and my stories are all, in one or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.
Michael Chabon
#30. That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather's view: to render memory unnecessary.
Michael Chabon
#31. All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.
Michael Chabon
#32. The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness
Michael Chabon
#33. We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place ...
Michael Chabon
#35. It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.
Michael Chabon
#36. He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.
Michael Chabon
#37. We can't take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us.
Michael Chabon
#38. He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.
Michael Chabon
#39. He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style.
Michael Chabon
#40. The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
Michael Chabon
#41. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect.
Michael Chabon
#42. And that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.
Michael Chabon
#43. 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!
Michael Chabon
#44. 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.
Michael Chabon
#45. Even the most casual study of the record ... would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.
Michael Chabon
#46. He nodded then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policeman like look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes.
Michael Chabon
#47. I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone. "How
Michael Chabon
#48. He stank more than any human joe had ever smelled, as if he had been dipped in some ungodly confection of camembert and rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor.
Michael Chabon
#49. They weren't my family and it wasn't my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.
Michael Chabon
#50. His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer.
Michael Chabon
#51. ...and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.
Michael Chabon
#52. 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
Michael Chabon
#53. I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
Michael Chabon
#54. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.
Michael Chabon
#55. He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
Michael Chabon
#56. It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.
Michael Chabon
#57. The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.
Michael Chabon
#58. Only Aviva's long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction - the boy was trouble - and admire Titus's stillness.
Michael Chabon
#59. As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
Michael Chabon
#60. Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
Michael Chabon
#62. At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.
Michael Chabon
#63. This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.
Michael Chabon
#64. 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.
Michael Chabon
#65. wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the rise, that the Rus had abandoned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they
Michael Chabon
#66. He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much
indeed to revolve around him
could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.
Michael Chabon
#67. But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ.
Michael Chabon
#68. It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.
Michael Chabon
#69. For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.
Michael Chabon
#70. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.
The question becomes what to do with the pieces?
Michael Chabon
#72. The Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.
Michael Chabon
#73. Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes.
Michael Chabon
#74. And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself.
Michael Chabon
#75. When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely ... Having a big family solves that problem.
Michael Chabon
#76. It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.
Michael Chabon
#77. I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.
Michael Chabon
#78. 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.
Michael Chabon
#79. Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.
Michael Chabon
#80. My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.
Michael Chabon
#81. That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed.
Michael Chabon
#82. Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.
Michael Chabon
#83. For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.
Michael Chabon
#84. You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?"
I don't think so."
"Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing."
He had a notion. "Such things like?"
"Like bringing you up here to my room.
Michael Chabon
#85. Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing down with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.
Michael Chabon
#86. A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction
Michael Chabon
#87. An excess of the desire to appear grown up is one of the defining characteristics of adolescence.
Michael Chabon
#88. There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it.
Michael Chabon
#89. It's the kind of house you'd like to wake up in on Christmas morning.
Michael Chabon
#90. I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.
Michael Chabon
#91. 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.
Michael Chabon
#92. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.
Michael Chabon
#93. Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises.
Michael Chabon
#94. Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
Michael Chabon
#95. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
Michael Chabon
#96. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
Michael Chabon
#97. bells. "I accept your kind invitation," Zelikman said. "My services as a physician ought just to offset my fare." The elephant gave a low moan, startling them, and a moment later they heard a faint trill, carried on the wind from off the river, and then another. "Trumpets," the nephew said.
Michael Chabon
#98. It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
Michael Chabon
#99. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.
Michael Chabon
#100. And because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.
Michael Chabon
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
