Michael Chabon Quotes

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

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

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

Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes what to do with the pieces?

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

Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.

A father is a man who fails every day.

For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. ... I think it's just a natural human response to loss.

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.

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

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

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

Do what you gotta do and stay fly

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

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

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.

If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world...?

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

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

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

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.

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

[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.

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.