Michael Chabon: Likeness

“Never say love is "like" anything… It isn't.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

Love

“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)

Animals

“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

Night

“[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)

Housing

“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)

People , Confidence , Thinking

“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)

People , Feeling , Exercises , Housing

“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)

Tree

“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

Secret

“The imagination of teenagers is often -- I'm tempted to say always -- the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control.During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art: books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing games. Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for them.”

Michael Chabon

Nanny Nation http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/15/EDG8D64JFR1.DTL, San Francisco Chronicle (April 15, 2004)

Love , Books , Art , Music

“He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.”

Michael Chabon

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 23

Love , Heart

“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

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

Life , God

“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Women , Men , Children , Secret

“Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.”

Michael Chabon

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

Men