Moonglow Quotes

“That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“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, Moonglow

“The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn't last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they're all still around. I'm ashamed of myself.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather's wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother's question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They’d”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“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, Moonglow

“She had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“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, Moonglow

“One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit."
"Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. "You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I'm making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?"
"When the earth's shadow falls across the Moon."
"Very significant. I'm sure it's a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that."
"Kind of trite." I said.
He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life--his, everyone's--I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“Eltűnődtem, hogy az embernek természetes, hogy élete első részében az idősek kliséit és hagyományait gúnyolja, az utolsó részében meg a fiatalok kliséit és hagyományait.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“Do you think they were ever happy?"
"Definitely," I said.
"Definitely?"
"For sure."
"She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn't have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business. When were they happy?"
"In the cracks?" I said.
"In the cracks."
"Yeah.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour's sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-truck, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather's estate, that fifty percent of a person's medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather's history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“It turned out that the V-2 was not a means to liberate the human spirit from the chains of gravity; it was only a pretext for further enchainment.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“Across the feral golf course on the other side of the fence, a million insects played a one-note tone poem entitled Heat.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow