|
98209a6
|
He was twenty years old, and he had fallen in love with Rosa Saks, in the wild scholastic manner of twenty-year-old men, seeing, in the tiniest minutiae, evidence of the systematic perfection of the whole and proof of a benign creation.... 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 ..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
fd4ae37
|
luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They'd
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
9b264ba
|
When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. 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 |
|
aef8ef8
|
There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dark, dull submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
497583b
|
Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
6951c29
|
Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe was not the early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman - Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the e..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
2a48fda
|
I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.
|
|
love
|
Michael Chabon |
|
8b5ca9e
|
This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.
|
|
nostalgia
|
Michael Chabon |
|
7e08de9
|
He's writing his name in water," I said. "What's that?" It was the half-regretful term--borrowed from the headstone of John Keats--that Crabtree used to describe his own and others' failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree's chosen g..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
b80951c
|
It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelin..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
88b23ed
|
There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
8e575c1
|
Fue siendo alumno de este hombre cuando empece a preguntarme si los literatos no sufren alguna variedad de desequilibrio mental, desequilibrio que, pensando en el trepidante balanceo nocturno de Albert Vetch, he denominado "el mal de la medianoche". Este mal es un insomnio de origen emocional: el paciente se siente solo en todo momento -aunque escriba al amanecer o a media tarde- como si estuviese echado en un asfixiante dormitorio, con la ..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
304f7f9
|
As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
|
|
writing
|
Michael Chabon |
|
86443d0
|
You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.' ... 'What is the other fifteen percent?' Nat said. 'Just out of curiosity?' 'Politeness,' Mr. Jones said without hesitation. 'And keeping a level head.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
723bfe2
|
It was rare but not unheard of for an analysand tossed by tides of transference and desublimation to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier's doorstep or by contrast inflamed with the special hatred of counter-transference to leave herself there in some desperate condition as a cruel prank like a paper sack of dog turds set afire.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
b3401c5
|
He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
9564d4a
|
The hidden master of the Filipino-style Chinese donut is Benito Taganes, proprietor and king of the bubbling vats at Mabuhay. Mabuhay, dark, cramped, invisible from the street, stays open all night long. 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 shlemiels, whores and night owls. With the fat applauding ..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
0c5a4af
|
Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
94ff05a
|
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
6628dc4
|
At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
0b472a5
|
The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This i..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
aea641f
|
I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone. "How"
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
7e3f89a
|
In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour's sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of ..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
d45172b
|
Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map -marked HERE THERE BE TYGERS and MEAN KID WITH AIR RIFLE-that he or she has been able to construct out of patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neigh..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
89eb588
|
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
ab7cd78
|
Can you imagine an infinite tree?...A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything?...if you've ever looked at a tree you've seen how its trunk divides into boughs, which divide yet again to branches, which divide into twigs, which divide again into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million tiny green shoots..
|
|
invisible-tree
shadowtails
summerland
|
Michael Chabon |
|
6cc3cf4
|
It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
9318f16
|
Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not fantasy.
|
|
their-fantasy
fantasy-world
|
Michael Chabon |
|
274c932
|
Nel 1939, il giornale a fumetti americano, come i castori e gli scarafaggi della preistoria, era piu grande e, voluminoso com'era, piu ricco dei suoi moderni discendenti. Aspirava alle dimensioni di una rivista e allo spessore di un pulp, offrendo sessantaquattro pagine (compresa la copertina) di sgargiante abbondanza al prezzo ideale di una monetina da dieci cent. Mentre la qualita delle illustrazioni all'interno era, nel migliore dei casi..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
8762bab
|
My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
7462d95
|
Sammy performed the rapid series of operations - which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops - that passed, in his mother's kitchen, for eating.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
37e4b79
|
Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she's black. And look I mean you're aware of my policy when it comes to that kind of situation." "Your policy is 'What do I know about being black?'" "What do I know about being black?..."
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
8ebc862
|
The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
89ca787
|
Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence, and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life--feeding on to it like a sun, ..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
5888d2f
|
Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his ..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
39afbf7
|
but a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
97fd5ba
|
The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
cb3a362
|
Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled, Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and cold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was much, much more, tha..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
fff8ae1
|
A]dventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result -- and have been since at least the time of Odysseus -- of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
535a38e
|
a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A's play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and form..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
06eb19c
|
The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood--sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
b1f8898
|
He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in soci..
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
cc2e76c
|
The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |
|
796db3c
|
She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.
|
|
|
Michael Chabon |