Michael Chabon > Quotes

“The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness”
― Michael Chabon

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write:

too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,

too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,

too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,

too many divorces to grant,

heirs to disinherit,

trysts to arrange,

letters to misdirect into evil hands,

innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,

women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,

men to drive to adultery and theft,

fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. ”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't.”
― Michael Chabon, Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

“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, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.”
― Michael Chabon

“I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.

”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. 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. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake. ”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“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, Wonder Boys

“I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.”

Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.

”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”
― Michael Chabon, Summerland

“I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. ”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“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, Wonder Boys

“Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.”
― Michael Chabon

“It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.”
― Michael Chabon

“It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“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, Wonder Boys

“Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.”
― Michael Chabon, Summerland

“The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”
― Michael Chabon

“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, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.”
― Michael Chabon

“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, Wonder Boys

“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

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
― Michael Chabon

“All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“... But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.”
― Michael Chabon, A Model World and Other Stories

“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

“Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”
― Michael Chabon, Summerland

“There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.”
― Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

“I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“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, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“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, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”
― Michael Chabon

“But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-'

She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“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.
”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every 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 neighbors soundly sleep. this is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys