Chabon Quotes & Sayings

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

The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me. — Michael Chabon

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

I hate to see great works of literature ghettoized, whereas others that conform to the rules, conventions, and procedures of the genre we call literary fiction get accorded greater esteem and privilege. I also have a problem with how books are marketed, with certain cover designs and typefaces. They're often stamped with an identity that has nothing to do with their effect on the reader. — Michael Chabon

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

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

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle. — Michael Chabon

I told you, hon, I'm not a real person. This is my job. — Michael Chabon

But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given. — Michael Chabon

It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology. — Michael Chabon

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Nit even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all. — Michael Chabon

The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect. — Michael Chabon

Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath. — Michael Chabon

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late. — Michael Chabon

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

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

It seemed to me that Q. was talking about the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to "fit in" by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze. — Michael Chabon

All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe. — Michael Chabon

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

But a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge. — Michael Chabon

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

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

One knew, of course, that it was not the red cape any more than it was the boots, the tights, the trunks, or the trademark "S" that gave Superman the ability to fly. That ability derived from the effects of the rays of our yellow sun on Superman's alien anatomy, which had evolved under the red sun of Krypton. And yet you had only to tie a towel around your shoulders to feel the strange vibratory pulse of flight stirring in the red sun of your heart. — Michael Chabon

stories make life so much better. — Michael Chabon

Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes. — Michael Chabon

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

I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray. — Michael Chabon

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study. — Michael Chabon

A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair. — Michael Chabon

Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't. — Michael Chabon

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

The hidden master of the Filipino-style Chinese donut is Benito Taganes, proprietor and king of the bubbling vats at Mabuhay. Mabuhay, dark, cramped, invisible from the street, stays open all night long. It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers and shlemiels, whores and night owls. With the fat applauding in the fryers, the exhaust fans roaring, and the boom box blasting the heartsick kundimans of Benito's Manila childhood, the clientele makes free with their secrets. A golden mist of kosher oil hangs in the air and baffles the senses. Who could overhear with ears full of KosherFry and the wailing of Diomedes Maturan? — Michael Chabon

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

I feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. That's something I almost take for granted. I think it was more a concern to get the details right and persuasively recreate the world I was trying to write about. — Michael Chabon

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

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

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

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was. — Michael Chabon

... remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder. — Michael Chabon

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

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

Acromegaly. Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a neurologist — Michael Chabon

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

But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo prose together to make a short story. — Michael Chabon

You were right once, young man," Anapol said. "That may be all the being right you get. — Michael Chabon

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

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

He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat. — Michael Chabon

The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly. — Michael Chabon

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

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope. — Michael Chabon

Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous. — Michael Chabon

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down. — Michael Chabon

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine an infinite tree? ... A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? ... if you've ever looked at a tree you've seen how its trunk divides into boughs, which divide yet again to branches, which divide into twigs, which divide again into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. — Michael Chabon

The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike. — Michael Chabon

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

The Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents. — Michael Chabon

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

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

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

I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people. — Michael Chabon

[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother. — Michael Chabon

I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done. — Michael Chabon

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat
was, literally, talked into life. — Michael Chabon

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

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

Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children. — Michael Chabon

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

Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go. — Michael Chabon

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

That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather's view: to render memory unnecessary. — Michael Chabon

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

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

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts. — Michael Chabon

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

I guess I don't fit the new corporate profile." "Which is?" "Competence. — Michael Chabon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story. — Michael Chabon

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong. — Michael Chabon

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. — Michael Chabon

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

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

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

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

It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress. — Michael Chabon

Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn't particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up. — Michael Chabon

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

A father is a man who fails every day. — Michael Chabon

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination. — Michael Chabon