Michael Chabon Quotes
May 24, 1963
More Michael Chabon Quotes
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 Chabon— The Recipe for Life, The Washington Book World (2000)
Childhood, 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 Chabon— Maps and Legends, Architectural Digest (April 2001)
I 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 Chabon— Introduction to McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004)
As 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Michael Chabon— Unpublished Letter of Complaint to The New York Review of Books
[Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying but entirely bogus rumble of pleasure.
Michael Chabon— Greasy Kids’ Stuff
"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal . "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in."
Michael Chabon— Part I, ch. 1
"Forget about what you are escaping from ," he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. "Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to ."
Michael Chabon— Part I, ch. 2
The 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— Chapter 1 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
“Are you mocking the concept?” “Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.”
Michael Chabon— Chapter 9 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
The 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 Chabon— Chapter 9 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
A 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 Chabon— Chapter 10 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
He 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 Chabon— Chapter 12 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
Michael Chabon— Chapter 16 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.
Michael Chabon— Chapter 23 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.
Michael Chabon— Chapter 23 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
He 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 Chabon— Chapter 23 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself
Michael Chabon— Chapter 38 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
Michael Chabon— Chapter 39 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
Litvak 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 Chabon— Chapter 39 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was.
Michael Chabon— Chapter 46 (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007))
[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 Chabon— Afterword (Gentlemen of the Road (2007))
It 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— A Woman of Valor, Alure (May 2004)
