Michael Chabon Quotes (96 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

The New York Times Magazine http://wonderwhenyoullmissme.com/chabon.html (December 28th, 2003) <br class="br">About Amanda Davis, who died at the age of 32 in a plane crash

“The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.”

Michael Chabon

Obama vs. the Phobocracy http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/03/AR2008020302526.html, Washington Post (February 4, 2008)

“The Weinreichs have laid out, with numerical precision, the outlines of a world, of a fantastic land in which it would behoove you to know how to say, in Yiddish,
250. What is the flight number?
1372. I need something for a tourniquet.
1379. Here is my identification.
254. Can I go by boat/ferry to----?”

Michael Chabon

A Yiddish Pale Fire

Michael Chabon: Trending quotes

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys (1995)

“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”

Michael Chabon book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Source: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.”

Michael Chabon book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon Quotes

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

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys

“The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness”

Michael Chabon

“Man makes plans… and God laughs.”

Michael Chabon

“Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”

Michael Chabon book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Part I, ch. 2
Variant: "Forget about what you are escaping from," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to."
Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

“It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.”

Michael Chabon

“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 book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Source: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“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 book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys (1995)

“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 book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys (1995)

“Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.”

Michael Chabon book Summerland

Source: Summerland

“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 book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys

“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 book Summerland

Source: Summerland

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

Michael Chabon

“Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”

Michael Chabon book Summerland

Source: Summerland

“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys

“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 book The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Source: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.”

Michael Chabon

“But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.”

Michael Chabon book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Source: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“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 book Wonder Boys

Source: Wonder Boys

“A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”

Michael Chabon

“The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.”

Michael Chabon

“Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the job as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn't, I might as well have.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“I think it was when I got to the butterflies -- in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death and technology -- that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor.”

Michael Chabon

Close Encounters http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62470-2002Apr4, Washington Post (April 7, 2002) <br class="br">On reading Rocket Man by Ray Bradbury

“[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land.”

Michael Chabon

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

“[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the powers of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation.”

Michael Chabon book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Part II, ch. 1
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“[L]ook at yourself right now… hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books.”

Michael Chabon book Gentlemen of the Road

… It makes me want to laugh.
Afterword
Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

“Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“…as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.”

Michael Chabon

Unpublished Letter of Complaint to The New York Review of Books

“The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It 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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 46

“The presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria.”

Michael Chabon

The God of Dark Laughter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)

“If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I’m thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.”

Michael Chabon

Introduction to McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004)

“Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along just, under their boot, lay the abyss. This is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 11

“Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.”

Michael Chabon

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

“I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a 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 book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“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

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 39

“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

The Recipe for Life http://www.fiu.edu/~weitzb/Golem-Recipe-for-Life.htm, The Washington Book World (2000)

“"I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 16

“[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 book Gentlemen of the Road

Afterword
Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

“When Berkeley does not feel like some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia—a kind of left-wing Plymouth Plantation in which a man may be pilloried for over-illuminating his house at Christmastime—then paradoxically it often feels like a place filled with people incapable of feeling or acting in concert with each other.”

Michael Chabon

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

“It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.”

Michael Chabon

Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/opinion/13CHAB.html?ex=1397188800&en=e08e585ef55c305e&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND, New York Times (April 13, 2004)

““Are you mocking the concept?”
“Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.””

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 9

“The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

“A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 10

“He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 12