28c1f98
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she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.
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Michael Chabon |
ed9a0e4
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Singletary arched an eyebrow then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button on a homemade jetpack.
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Michael Chabon |
8cc6709
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the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.
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Michael Chabon |
8ed7b59
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That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed.
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Michael Chabon |
2d3e761
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You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?" I don't think so." "Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing." He had a notion. "Such things like?" "Like bringing you up here to my room."
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Michael Chabon |
54ab3b7
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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."
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Michael Chabon |
77016f4
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At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.
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Michael Chabon |
6fca7d3
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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."
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Michael Chabon |
eb2277f
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Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to ..
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Michael Chabon |
ad9d2fb
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When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place.
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Michael Chabon |
9fca6cc
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and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.
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Michael Chabon |
44a5c17
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Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.
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Michael Chabon |
aaf0eff
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ONE OF THE STURDIEST PRECEPTS of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they..
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Michael Chabon |
38ccd45
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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.
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Michael Chabon |
3c64339
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He didn't stop when they got there, though. Just slowed down, in his drag-ass, baby-smelling, style-free Subaru wagon, long enough to check out a banner announcing, in baseball-jersey script, the imminent opening for business, between the United Federation of Donuts and the King of Bling, of a trading card store called Mr. Nostalgia's Neighborhood. Beyond the fourth grade or so, Archy had never taken much interest in baseball cards, but he ..
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Michael Chabon |
fc0e1ad
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You hope to spend your life doing what you love and need and have been fitted by nature or God or your protein-package to do: write, draw, sing, tell stories. But you have to eat.
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Michael Chabon |
cc7e492
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Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum
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Michael Chabon |
0b7705d
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The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.
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Michael Chabon |
28f3916
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Thus while claiming, on the one hand, a dubiously ahistorical, archetypical source for the superhero idea in the Jungian vastness of legend, we dissolve its true universality in a foaming bath of periodized explanations, and render the superhero and his costume a time-fixed idea that is always already going out of fashion.
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Michael Chabon |
78d0049
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just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.
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Michael Chabon |
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The other fellow was more of a fireplug, broad in the chest and shoulders, with a wide pugnacious face and the hint of a shadow even on his freshly shaved jaw. He always looked as if he had not dressed for work that morning so much as gotten into some kind of altercation with his suit, shirt, and tie.
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Michael Chabon |
a1a537f
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And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them. He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea o..
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Michael Chabon |
857ce90
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In my innocent cynicism I didn't see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn't care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing that he was an alcoholic. And an alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the most carefully planned and prepared for events in the world.
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Michael Chabon |
ac2ac2e
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the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things.
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Michael Chabon |
4c4aec0
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Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.
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Michael Chabon |
1628d23
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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 attrib..
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Michael Chabon |
8d7cac2
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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.
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Michael Chabon |
d375543
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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.
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Michael Chabon |
fbbc19f
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Doktore, az s'm inzhener, elektroinzhener. Tova e obrazovanieto mi. Inzhenerite otdeliat mnogo vreme za neshcho, koeto se naricha analiz na povredata. Nezavisimo ot tova dali proektirash, izpitvash, ili izgrazhdash... zashchoto, razbirate li, neshchata se chupiat. Te se povrezhdat, vzriviavat se, rukhvat, izgariat, ima natovarvane, iznosvane, schupvane. A p'k chovek iska da razbere na kakvo se d'lzhi povredata, tova e chast ot rabotata. Isk..
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love
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Michael Chabon |
4e7d13b
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She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.
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Michael Chabon |
3f9226a
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Do you think they were ever happy?" "Definitely," I said. "Definitely?" "For sure." "She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn't have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business. When were they happy?" "In the cracks?" I said. "In the cracks." "Yeah."
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lovers
marriage
love
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Michael Chabon |
6db73a2
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How do I focus it?" Joe asked him, lowering the camera. "Oh, don't bother about that. Just look at me and push the little lever. Your mind will do the rest." "My mind." Joe snapped a photo of his host, then handed the camera back to him. "The camera is ..." He searched for the word in English. "Telepathic." "All cameras are," his host said mildly. "I have been photographed now by seven thousand one hundred and ... eighteen ... people, all w..
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Michael Chabon |
ed2a1c6
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As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?"
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Michael Chabon |
6cb2148
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Let's blow their little minds. A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are all good things; 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 th..
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Michael Chabon |
0653e28
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The handy thing about being a father is that the historical standard is so pitifully low.
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Michael Chabon |
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I don't look stoned?" My heart began to pound. The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight--and if possible operate complicated machinery--while immense shrieking nebulae are coming asunder in his brain. To fail at this--to be found out--carries a mysterious burden of anxiety and shame. "How are my eyes?"
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Michael Chabon |
e39bb6a
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Books were hungry things, and if you stayed too long in any one place, they would consume everything and everyone around you.
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love-of-books
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Michael Chabon |
67779cc
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Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.
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Michael Chabon |
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Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank--but that's not the same thing. --Joseph Conrad
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Michael Chabon |
49cb558
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Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn't particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about his life and work and personal demons. I reflected for a moment on the journalistic euphemism that allowed personal demons to writers who were only fucked up.
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Michael Chabon |
5bf9af4
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Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
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life
love
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Michael Chabon |
381f2ca
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I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.
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Michael Chabon |
3840c07
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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.
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Michael Chabon |
ddbd685
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Never worry about what you are escaping from," he said. "Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to."
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Michael Chabon |