At any rate it is impossible to live intelligently as a member of a minority group in a nation that was founded every bit as firmly on enslavement and butchery as on ideals of liberty and brotherhood and not feel, at least every once in a while, that you can no more take for granted the continued tolerance of your existence here than you ought take the prosperity or freedom you enjoy.

— Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon Quotes

You were right once, young man,” Anapol said. “That may be all the being right you get.

— Michael Chabon

As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew – felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm – that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything whatsoever to do with his willingness or ability to be a father to the forthcoming child now putting the finishing touches on its respiratory and endocrine systems in the dark laboratory of his wife’s womb. Wiping.

— Michael Chabon

Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.

— Michael Chabon

Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written.

— Michael Chabon

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed.

— Michael Chabon

Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.

— Michael Chabon

What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.

— Michael Chabon

Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life.

— Michael Chabon

Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist’s urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world.

— Michael Chabon

Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. “Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.

— Michael Chabon

He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.

— Michael Chabon

I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.

— Michael Chabon

He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much – indeed to revolve around him – could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.

— Michael Chabon

All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.

— Michael Chabon

I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox.

— Michael Chabon

She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.” “See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.

— Michael Chabon

He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.

— Michael Chabon

One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.

— Michael Chabon

He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.

— Michael Chabon

A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction.

— Michael Chabon
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