Top 100 Chabon Quotes
#1. Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'
Cathleen Schine
#2. The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.
George R R Martin
#3. Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#4. I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
Salman Rushdie
#6. 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
#7. 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[ ... ]
Michael Chabon
#8. And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.
Michael Chabon
#9. I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility.
Michael Chabon
#10. The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.
Michael Chabon
#11. It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.
Michael Chabon
#12. 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
#13. Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms.
Michael Chabon
#14. 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
#15. Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?
Michael Chabon
#16. Wait, no, fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores and, and, molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains, too. Cheese and music duking it out for control of the human nervous system.
Michael Chabon
#18. 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
#19. Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
Michael Chabon
#20. I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
Michael Chabon
#21. He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.
Michael Chabon
#22. It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls.
Michael Chabon
#23. This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
Michael Chabon
#25. 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
#26. Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time lapse photos of a promise as it broke.
Michael Chabon
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.
Michael Chabon
#30. 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
#31. The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
Michael Chabon
#32. The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.
Michael Chabon
#33. He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch, as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbarian horde mounted its conquering ponies.
Michael Chabon
#34. It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.
Michael Chabon
#35. 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
#36. The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood - sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire.
Michael Chabon
#37. 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.
Michael Chabon
#38. And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.
Michael Chabon
#39. He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.
Michael Chabon
#40. The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
Michael Chabon
#41. The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.
Michael Chabon
#42. I didn't want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matching orange chairs.
Michael Chabon
#43. It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections.
Michael Chabon
#44. 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.
Michael Chabon
#45. And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that.
Michael Chabon
#46. You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.' ...
'What is the other fifteen percent?' Nat said. 'Just out of curiosity?'
'Politeness,' Mr. Jones said without hesitation. 'And keeping a level head.
Michael Chabon
#47. 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.
Michael Chabon
#48. 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.
Michael Chabon
#49. He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance - that was all.
Michael Chabon
#50. I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.
Michael Chabon
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe.
Michael Chabon
#55. Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.
Michael Chabon
#56. I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.
Michael Chabon
#57. Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
Michael Chabon
#58. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.
Michael Chabon
#59. In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it.
Michael Chabon
#60. But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.
Michael Chabon
#61. As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.
Michael Chabon
#62. There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
Michael Chabon
#63. 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
#64. Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
Michael Chabon
#65. 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
Michael Chabon
#66. Sammy performed the rapid series of operations - which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops - that passed, in his mother's kitchen, for eating.
Michael Chabon
#67. Jesus Fucking Christ, she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see.
Michael Chabon
#68. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.
Michael Chabon
#69. Shprintzl Rudashevsky's wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she's wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.
Michael Chabon
#70. She deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.
Michael Chabon
#71. It's simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me.
Michael Chabon
#72. 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.
Michael Chabon
#73. 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
#74. [His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
Michael Chabon
#75. 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
#76. It's a sinking ship," he said. "You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard.
Michael Chabon
#77. Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.
The Killer Hook
Michael Chabon
#78. Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.
Michael Chabon
#80. Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
Michael Chabon
#81. The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
Michael Chabon
#82. I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.
Michael Chabon
#83. 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
#84. Sara hadn't the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man.
Michael Chabon
#85. The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go.
Michael Chabon
#86. Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.
Michael Chabon
#87. grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For
Michael Chabon
#88. As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms.
Michael Chabon
#89. Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head.
Michael Chabon
#90. So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.
Michael Chabon
#91. 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
#92. 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.
Michael Chabon
#93. The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?
Michael Chabon
#94. That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather's view: to render memory unnecessary.
Michael Chabon
#95. The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.
Michael Chabon
#96. 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
#97. because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second. I
Michael Chabon
#98. I charge you as I was charged. Don't waste your life. Don't allow your body's weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.
Michael Chabon
#99. He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something.
Michael Chabon
#100. For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. I think it's just a natural human response to loss.
Michael Chabon
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