Quotes by Michael Chabon

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your childs perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.

[My dad] didnt do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didnt take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didnt make the appointments. He didnt shop for my clothes. He didnt 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.

A father is a man who fails every day.

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dicks face. Its the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowerss face.

Anyway, its a pretty good story, I said. You have to admit.Yeah? He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. You can have it. Im giving it to you. After Im gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash Im making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?When the earths shadow falls across the Moon.Very significant. Im sure its a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.Kind of trite. I said.He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life--his, everyones--I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.

I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.

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

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood Normal Time in New California Writing

This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I dont know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasnt even alive. Thats what I do to you too, she said, Ill just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.

Although it wasnt raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.