Michael Chabon Quotes - Page 6

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.

I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such 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.

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

There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.

That's a big trunk," James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. "It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly." "That's just what they used to say in the ads," I said.

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

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.

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.

[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.

My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.

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

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

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

The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat.

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

Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.

The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.

I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.

I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.

There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.