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.
Michael ChabonChildhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.
Michael ChabonI suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I’m thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.
Michael ChabonAs for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.
Michael ChabonThe rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.
Michael Chabon“Are you mocking the concept?” “Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.”
Michael ChabonThe daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
Michael ChabonA friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.
Michael ChabonHe knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.
Michael ChabonMiracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
Michael ChabonEvery generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.
Michael ChabonHe’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.
Michael ChabonHe doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.
Michael ChabonEvery Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself
Michael ChabonA Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
Michael ChabonLitvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.
Michael ChabonHe didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was.
Michael Chabon[L]ook at yourself right now... hoping to lose yourself your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books . ... It makes me want to laugh.
Michael ChabonIt took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.
Michael Chabon