Werewolves in Their Youth Quotes

“Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe– a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“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, Werewolves in Their Youth

“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, Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories

“He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“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, Werewolves in Their Youth

“But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“Wow,’ said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentary scale model of her vanished life.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“Kohn had played on an intramural team in college. He had been the second-worst player on a team that finished in ninth place out of twelve.
Bengt looked a little surprised. “What position?”
“Outfield.” Kohn had a sudden craving for the broad skewed vista from far right, the distant buzz of chatter from the bench, the outfielder’s blank bovine consciousness of grass and sky. If you backed up far enough out there on a hot summer day you could sometimes see the curvature of the earth. “Mostly left.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“The fathers were standing around in their baseball caps, in a knot, smoking and talking. They looked over at Kohn’s van, trying to identify it. Many of them would have known each other all their lives. On this field they would have tormented the chubby, the bespectacled goat of their generation. Their sons sat clumped along the bench like pigeons on the arm of a statue.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“Midwives’ experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer’s knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe—a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“The local drunks - there must have been about sixty-five or seventy of them, many related by blood or sexual history - were a close-knit population involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose overcrowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball and arrest. There was no role in this communal endeavor for the summer islander, on leave, as it were, from work on the cathedral of his or her own bad decisions.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“...they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.”
― Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

“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, Werewolves in Their Youth