Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Michael Chabon, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Michael Chabon quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 377 Michael Chabon quotes for you to read and share.

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He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch, as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbarian horde mounted its conquering ponies. -- Michael Chabon
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This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me. -- Michael Chabon
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All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. -- Michael Chabon
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[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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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
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Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one. -- Michael Chabon
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because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second. I -- Michael Chabon
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When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place. -- Michael Chabon
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the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek. -- Michael Chabon
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That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution. -- Michael Chabon
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Jesus Fucking Christ, she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see. -- Michael Chabon
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They had an old-fashioned sincerity ... that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans. -- Michael Chabon
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Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses! -- Michael Chabon
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The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad. -- Michael Chabon
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Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination. -- Michael Chabon
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The baby, not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. 'What kind of heaven is that, you can't have your records?' The baby, understanding perhaps it was purely rhetorical, made no attempt to answer this question. -- Michael Chabon
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Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. -- Michael Chabon
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Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself? -- Michael Chabon
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I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away. -- Michael Chabon
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They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other -- Michael Chabon
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All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. -- Michael Chabon
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Only Aviva's long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction - the boy was trouble - and admire Titus's stillness. -- Michael Chabon
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It holds my essential stuff, including a book - for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[ ... ] -- Michael Chabon
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It's the kind of house you'd like to wake up in on Christmas morning. -- Michael Chabon
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I resign," says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He's late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch. -- Michael Chabon
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At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon. -- Michael Chabon
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You read my Cosmo?"
"I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions."
"How did I do?"
"You cheated," I said. -- Michael Chabon
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A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment. -- Michael Chabon
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I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone. "How -- Michael Chabon
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Shprintzl Rudashevsky's wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she's wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth. -- Michael Chabon
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It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world. -- Michael Chabon
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What kind of heaven is that, you can't have your records? -- Michael Chabon
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Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. -- Michael Chabon
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I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility. -- Michael Chabon
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wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the rise, that the Rus had abandoned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they -- Michael Chabon
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bells. "I accept your kind invitation," Zelikman said. "My services as a physician ought just to offset my fare." The elephant gave a low moan, startling them, and a moment later they heard a faint trill, carried on the wind from off the river, and then another. "Trumpets," the nephew said. -- Michael Chabon
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hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure. -- Michael Chabon
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There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent. -- Michael Chabon
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Love is like falconry," he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?"
"Never say love is like anything." said Cleveland. "It isn't. -- Michael Chabon
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You hit me with a tuba," he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry." A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my -- Michael Chabon
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Singletary arched an eyebrow then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button on a homemade jetpack. -- Michael Chabon
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A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs. -- Michael Chabon
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I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning. -- Michael Chabon
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Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail. -- Michael Chabon
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You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two. -- Michael Chabon
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And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things. -- Michael Chabon
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It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it. -- Michael Chabon
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Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot. -- Michael Chabon
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As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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Superheroes spend a lot of time wishing they could just stay home, spend time with their families and loved ones, date the girl they love, be like everybody else. -- Michael Chabon
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God, I just love 'A Journey to the End of the Millennium,' by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably 'Humboldt's Gift.' -- Michael Chabon
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Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place. -- Michael Chabon
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She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives. -- Michael Chabon
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He's making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don't know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural. -- Michael Chabon
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just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie. -- Michael Chabon
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And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said. -- Michael Chabon
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A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag. -- Michael Chabon
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She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home. -- Michael Chabon
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Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.
The Killer Hook -- Michael Chabon
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There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dark, dull submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder. -- Michael Chabon
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The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people. -- Michael Chabon
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A story begins with this nebulous feeling that's hard to get a hold of and you're testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos - like amber in which a memory gets trapped. -- Michael Chabon
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I charge you as I was charged. Don't waste your life. Don't allow your body's weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key. -- Michael Chabon
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And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others. -- Michael Chabon
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It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress. -- Michael Chabon
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Sammy felt...that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. -- Michael Chabon
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I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway. -- Michael Chabon
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That's why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in life, keep track of my errors. -- Michael Chabon
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Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time. -- Michael Chabon
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The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness -- Michael Chabon
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This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing -- Michael Chabon
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And that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime. -- Michael Chabon
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Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman's soul. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams. -- Michael Chabon
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The Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents. -- Michael Chabon
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There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it. -- Michael Chabon
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My dear son, It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with -- Michael Chabon
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All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure. -- Michael Chabon
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Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. -- Michael Chabon
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It's a sinking ship," he said. "You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard. -- Michael Chabon
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When he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts. -- Michael Chabon
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It's simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me. -- Michael Chabon
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She deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge. -- Michael Chabon
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When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference. -- Michael Chabon
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Sammy performed the rapid series of operations - which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops - that passed, in his mother's kitchen, for eating. -- Michael Chabon
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She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves. -- Michael Chabon
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There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal. -- Michael Chabon
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As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep. -- Michael Chabon
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But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given. -- Michael Chabon
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In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it. -- Michael Chabon
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Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon. -- Michael Chabon
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I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart. -- Michael Chabon
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Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve. -- Michael Chabon
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All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe. -- Michael Chabon
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Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head. -- Michael Chabon
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In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time. -- Michael Chabon
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For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. I think it's just a natural human response to loss. -- Michael Chabon
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He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something. -- Michael Chabon
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All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. -- Michael Chabon
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The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret. -- Michael Chabon
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That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather's view: to render memory unnecessary. -- Michael Chabon
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The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that? -- Michael Chabon
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My story and my stories are all, in one or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat. -- Michael Chabon
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So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong. -- Michael Chabon
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When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk. -- Michael Chabon
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grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For -- Michael Chabon
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Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention. -- Michael Chabon
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The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go. -- Michael Chabon
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Sara hadn't the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart. -- Michael Chabon
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Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands. -- Michael Chabon
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A father is a man who fails every day. -- Michael Chabon
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Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly. -- Michael Chabon
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Bird of Wide Experience I -- Michael Chabon
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Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman. -- Michael Chabon
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Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time lapse photos of a promise as it broke. -- Michael Chabon
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Oops, the moth woman mumbles -- Michael Chabon
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It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls. -- Michael Chabon
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He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew. -- Michael Chabon
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I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude. -- Michael Chabon
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Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member
if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains. -- Michael Chabon
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I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel. -- Michael Chabon
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Wait, no, fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores and, and, molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains, too. Cheese and music duking it out for control of the human nervous system. -- Michael Chabon
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Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware? -- Michael Chabon
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Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away.
Landsman looks away. -- Michael Chabon
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The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life. -- Michael Chabon
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But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve. -- Michael Chabon
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He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance - that was all. -- Michael Chabon
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I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That's another way of saying it was all I had. -- Michael Chabon
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You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.' ...
'What is the other fifteen percent?' Nat said. 'Just out of curiosity?'
'Politeness,' Mr. Jones said without hesitation. 'And keeping a level head. -- Michael Chabon
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And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that. -- Michael Chabon
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It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections. -- Michael Chabon
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He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989. -- Michael Chabon
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It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that. -- Michael Chabon
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The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood - sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire. -- Michael Chabon
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In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war. -- Michael Chabon
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The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low. -- Michael Chabon
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The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonders, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green. -- Michael Chabon
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When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely ... Having a big family solves that problem. -- Michael Chabon
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Because you know, truth is, I don't give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I'm like to want to slap somebody. I -- Michael Chabon
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We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place ... -- Michael Chabon
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For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down. -- Michael Chabon
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Although in the past I had seen a few exchanges of genuine affection between them, the Warshaw men were awkward and ill at ease with each other. -- Michael Chabon
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When she caught him staring, he would even more artlessly look down at the food on his plate with a show of puzzlement, as if he kept forgetting what supper was and how it was supposed to work. -- Michael Chabon
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Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I'm not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was a fire. -- Michael Chabon
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I'd spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. -- Michael Chabon
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So you were going to shoot him," Dick says. "That's some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh? -- Michael Chabon
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Entertainment has a bad name ... The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. -- Michael Chabon
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Irv had rediscovered, as surprisingly few men do, that the secret to perfect male happiness is a well-equipped clubhouse. -- Michael Chabon
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The rest of Sitka's homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms. -- Michael Chabon
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Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction.
The Killer Hook. -- Michael Chabon
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Zugzwang. It's when you have no good moves. But you still have to move. -- Michael Chabon
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It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology. -- Michael Chabon
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Always true to the code, she said. -- Michael Chabon
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And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared. -- Michael Chabon
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I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes. -- Michael Chabon
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Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing down with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped. -- Michael Chabon
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The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood. -- Michael Chabon
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But he had come here today to stand one final time at the top of one particular signal bridge that he had come to think of as his own, and tell another summer goodbye. -- Michael Chabon
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I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. -- Michael Chabon
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He stank more than any human joe had ever smelled, as if he had been dipped in some ungodly confection of camembert and rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor. -- Michael Chabon
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Even the most casual study of the record ... would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken. -- Michael Chabon
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Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam. -- Michael Chabon
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I knew that I shouldn't have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together. -- Michael Chabon
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I work at night, starting at around 10 o'clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley, I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime. -- Michael Chabon
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He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man. -- Michael Chabon
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If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late! -- Michael Chabon
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See you in the funny papers, he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation. -- Michael Chabon
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The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud? -- Michael Chabon
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His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer. -- Michael Chabon
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You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus. -- Michael Chabon
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Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I -- Michael Chabon
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The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire. -- Michael Chabon
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Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn't know how to do it. -- Michael Chabon
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The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings. -- Michael Chabon
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An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left with its engine running in the middle of his brain. -- Michael Chabon
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The greater involution and deeper patina of her left tooth in comparison to the right, the skeptical cast -- Michael Chabon
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It was the insoluble problems - the false leads and the cold cases - that reflected the true nature of things. -- Michael Chabon
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The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward -- Michael Chabon
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It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope. -- Michael Chabon
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The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day. -- Michael Chabon
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Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks. -- Michael Chabon
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It had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered
what matters so often in the course of everyday human life
were the surfaces and the joins. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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burned off their mutual contempt by abusing the counter help. My -- Michael Chabon
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That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly."
"That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said ... -- Michael Chabon
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Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy. -- Michael Chabon
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I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon, said the kid, gravely mistaken. -- Michael Chabon
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He nodded then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policeman like look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes. -- Michael Chabon
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I am a huge, raving fan of writer Matt Fraction. His semi-indie 'Casanova' series is an ongoing masterpiece of 21st-century American comics - and his run on 'Immortal Iron Fist' with Ed Brubaker was pure, yummy martial-arts-fantasy deliciousness. -- Michael Chabon
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Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she's black. And look I mean you're aware of my policy when it comes to that kind of situation."
"Your policy is 'What do I know about being black?'"
"What do I know about being black? ... -- Michael Chabon
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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
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I told you, hon, I'm not a real person. This is my job. -- Michael Chabon
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He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much
indeed to revolve around him
could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all. -- Michael Chabon
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Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. -- Michael Chabon
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He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again. -- Michael Chabon
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Mr. Nostalgia figured he could look it up later if he wanted to break some small, previously unbroken place in his own leaf-buried heart. -- Michael Chabon
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Nothing ever comes out the way I hope it will. That first vision, that initial vision you have of a book, what it's going to be like when it's done, it begins to go wrong the second you start to write. -- Michael Chabon
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WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY? And, lower: HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES Then: PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD A fourth man had concluded: AND OF EVERYTHING -- Michael Chabon
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I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear. -- Michael Chabon
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I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time -- Michael Chabon
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Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool. -- Michael Chabon
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A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental -- Michael Chabon
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A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner -- Michael Chabon
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I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats -- Michael Chabon
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I don't like to lose control of my emotions. -- Michael Chabon
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When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write. -- Michael Chabon
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Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. -- Michael Chabon
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Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. -- Michael Chabon
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Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world. -- Michael Chabon
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It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman. -- Michael Chabon
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That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed. -- Michael Chabon
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stories make life so much better. -- Michael Chabon
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A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction -- Michael Chabon
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The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. -- Michael Chabon
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He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again. -- Michael Chabon
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I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds. -- Michael Chabon
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It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him. -- Michael Chabon
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We can't take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us. -- Michael Chabon
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This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, -- Michael Chabon
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With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on. -- Michael Chabon
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You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?"
I don't think so."
"Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing."
He had a notion. "Such things like?"
"Like bringing you up here to my room. -- Michael Chabon
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There was nothing a man couldn't do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres. The car was called an El Camino for a reason. (Telegraph Avenue, p399) -- Michael Chabon
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He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman's lack of faith. -- Michael Chabon
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Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him. -- Michael Chabon
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I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years. -- Michael Chabon
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There is one sure means in life of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility and disillusionment. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money. -- Michael Chabon
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I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' -- Michael Chabon
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Badass.'" My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again. -- Michael Chabon
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He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them. -- Michael Chabon
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She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other. -- Michael Chabon
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That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver's head. 'Hey, bus driver,' I said. 'Can I smoke?' 'May I,' said the bus driver. 'I love you,' I said. -- Michael Chabon
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The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality. -- Michael Chabon
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They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away. -- Michael Chabon
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The April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence - the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness - was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all. -- Michael Chabon
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there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law's counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen. -- Michael Chabon
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The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue. -- Michael Chabon
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Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone. -- Michael Chabon
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Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use. -- Michael Chabon
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Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library. -- Michael Chabon
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Maybe I'm tired," he said. "Maybe I'm tired of picking up life in bits and fistfuls and little drawstring bags. When you get to be as old as I am, there's an appeal in the idea of seeing some business through from start to finish. -- Michael Chabon
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Childhood is a branch of cartography. -- Michael Chabon
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I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction. -- Michael Chabon
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She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned. -- Michael Chabon
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I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there. -- Michael Chabon
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Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in. -- Michael Chabon
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My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with. As -- Michael Chabon
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I guess I don't fit the new corporate profile." "Which is?" "Competence. -- Michael Chabon
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A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face. -- Michael Chabon
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The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory. -- Michael Chabon
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Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them. -- Michael Chabon
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I don't mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated. -- Michael Chabon
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Bright men in narrow neckties and short haircuts whose terrible optimism made the sixties such an admirable and disappointing time. -- Michael Chabon
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If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world ... ? -- Michael Chabon
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Dr. Roboy, in Litvak's measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence. -- Michael Chabon
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Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt. -- Michael Chabon
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He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future. -- Michael Chabon
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For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material. -- Michael Chabon
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They weren't my family and it wasn't my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get. -- Michael Chabon
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The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation. -- Michael Chabon
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[Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying but entirely bogus rumble of pleasure. -- Michael Chabon
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Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story. -- Michael Chabon
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For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight. -- Michael Chabon
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Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath. -- Michael Chabon
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Gibson Goode to Archy: You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin. -- Michael Chabon
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He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was. -- Michael Chabon
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Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life. -- Michael Chabon
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But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would *be* their lives. -- Michael Chabon
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A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime, I said, elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation -- Michael Chabon
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But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart. -- Michael Chabon
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And because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second. -- Michael Chabon
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As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective. -- Michael Chabon
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Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough? -- Michael Chabon
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The brake and gas were rigged to suit a man of his stature, and he handled them like Horowitz sailing through a storm of Liszt. -- Michael Chabon
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As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning? -- Michael Chabon
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Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't. -- Michael Chabon
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At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute. -- Michael Chabon
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I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox. -- Michael Chabon
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Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to. -- Michael Chabon
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As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place. -- Michael Chabon
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For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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A momentary gain in one's own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-hearted glee; -- Michael Chabon
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Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He -- Michael Chabon
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Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity. -- Michael Chabon
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Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze. -- Michael Chabon
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Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises. -- Michael Chabon
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He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged. -- Michael Chabon
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Vulgar language," Chan said ... "Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say. -- Michael Chabon
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Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. -- Michael Chabon
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Never worry about what you are escaping from," he said. "Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to. -- Michael Chabon
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Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life. -- Michael Chabon
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The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly. -- Michael Chabon
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I said, "I need to hear something that's going to save my life."
Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.
-- Michael Chabon
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But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ. -- Michael Chabon
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The evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. -- Michael Chabon
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We figure he must have let him out. The perpetrator, I mean. He's blind and we figure he just wandered off and maybe got run over."
"The perpetrator."
"No, the dog. -- Michael Chabon
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I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house. -- Michael Chabon
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I can imagine anything except having no imagination. -- Michael Chabon
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He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat. -- Michael Chabon
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That was all very nice of them. They didn't have to do anything because I wasn't officially involved at all. -- Michael Chabon
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He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style. -- Michael Chabon
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Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a -- Michael Chabon
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He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people's bad decisions along with his own. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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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
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She had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work. -- Michael Chabon
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I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon. -- Michael Chabon
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But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake. -- Michael Chabon
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What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it. -- Michael Chabon
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Eight solid light-years of lead ... is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere. -- Michael Chabon
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Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes. -- Michael Chabon
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He lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears. -- Michael Chabon
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People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.
[Afterword] -- Michael Chabon
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People keep saying, 'Oh, you're getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.' I guess it does, but mostly it's just a relief. -- Michael Chabon
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They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad. -- Michael Chabon
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I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image. -- Michael Chabon
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Praise means so much when it comes from a lunatic -- Michael Chabon
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There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love. -- Michael Chabon
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In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you. -- Michael Chabon
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He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944. -- Michael Chabon
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It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster. -- Michael Chabon
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My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There -- Michael Chabon
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From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He -- Michael Chabon
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I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray. -- Michael Chabon
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Acromegaly. Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a neurologist -- Michael Chabon
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Man makes plans . . . and God laughs. -- Michael Chabon
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My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker. -- Michael Chabon
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Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it. -- Michael Chabon
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Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.
The question becomes what to do with the pieces? -- Michael Chabon
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When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time. -- Michael Chabon
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Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. -- Michael Chabon
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... remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder. -- Michael Chabon
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the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things. -- Michael Chabon
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Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity. -- Michael Chabon
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I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.
-- Michael Chabon
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You were right once, young man," Anapol said. "That may be all the being right you get. -- Michael Chabon
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Everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he'd left the whole world to me in his will. -- Michael Chabon
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It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late. -- Michael Chabon
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Long life wore away everything that was not essential. -- Michael Chabon
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I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done. -- Michael Chabon
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I have a boyfriend now. A real one. We're totally dating, it's very strange. -- Michael Chabon
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He addressed the class ... in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock. -- Michael Chabon
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It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle. -- Michael Chabon
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An excess of the desire to appear grown up is one of the defining characteristics of adolescence. -- Michael Chabon
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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
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Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker. -- Michael Chabon
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The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash. -- Michael Chabon
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She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand. -- Michael Chabon
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My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with. -- Michael Chabon
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Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems. -- Michael Chabon
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Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. -- Michael Chabon
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A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding. -- Michael Chabon
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Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself. -- Michael Chabon
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His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air. -- Michael Chabon
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...and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed. -- Michael Chabon
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He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.
"Just watch me," he said. -- Michael Chabon
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He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He -- Michael Chabon
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The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. -- Michael Chabon
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It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that's what interested me. -- Michael Chabon
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No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief. -- Michael Chabon
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The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike. -- Michael Chabon
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He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people. -- Michael Chabon
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my grandmother would freak you the fuck out. -- Michael Chabon
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Do what you gotta do and stay fly -- Michael Chabon
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Never worry about what you're escaping from," he said. "Worry about what you're escaping to. -- Michael Chabon
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It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real. -- Michael Chabon