Michael Chabon citations

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Man makes plans… and God laughs.”

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

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

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

“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”

“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…”

“Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself”

“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.”

“Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!”

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

“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.”