Michael Chabon: Trending quotes (page 2)

“No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.”

“As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.”

“I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.”

Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.”

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

“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.”

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

“My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.”

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

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

“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.”

“Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.”

“A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”

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

“Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”

“… But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”