The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

“I don’t think that,” Sammy said, though there was stunning accuracy in this assessment.

Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.

She set the percolator on the ring and turned on the gas. “Stand back,” she said, striking a match. She must have been lighting gas stoves for thirty years, but each time it was as if entering a burning building.

explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them.

They might reflect on the endurance of this monument to a failure, or on the dignity and poignance that time can bring to human detritus,

As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it. There were always well-meaning adults trying to jolly him, to improve and counsel him, to bribe and cajole and bully him into making friends, speaking up, getting some fresh air;

A man in love at twenty feels more alive than he ever will again—

their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.