The Final Solution Quotes

“Long life wore away everything that was not essential.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was - and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her "romantic nature" - a hunger devoid of prurience, appetite, malice, or goodwill. It was a hunger, she decided later, for information. And yet there was liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement, as if a steady lifelong diet of mundane observations had preserved the youthful-ness of his optic organs alone.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“His bit of pencil turned up in the seat pocket of his short trousers, but as the search for the pad continued without issue a crease appeared in the boy's domed brow. He patted himself up and down until filaments of honey floss formed between his fingertips and pockets, coating him in a gossamer down. The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife's lover, this you consider to be unlikely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand—”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven brothers and a widowed father, had every been obliged to inhale. It hung in the room as thick as sheepshearing and made arabesques in the harsh slanting light from the window.”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

“Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?”
― Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection