The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

“People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”

It was one of those prolonged silences that meant, Ethel always used to say, that somewhere an idiot had just been born.

“No medium is inherently better than any other.” Belief in this dictum was almost a requirement for residence in her father’s house.

Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.

As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?”