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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | fantasy-world their-fantasy | 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 | ||
| 163f914 | Gibson Goode to Archy: "You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin." | Michael Chabon | ||
| 7b38266 | The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, .. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 263254f | A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face. | smile | Michael Chabon | |
| 0ce17a9 | You read my Cosmo?" "I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions." "How did I do?" "You cheated," I said." | cosmo quiz | Michael Chabon | |
| 912b2f9 | He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge. | Michael Chabon | ||
| d241921 | Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it." | Michael Chabon | ||
| 6327b60 | he lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears. | Michael Chabon | ||
| 906b2c1 | And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said. | Michael Chabon | ||
| baa0c82 | Valetta," he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer's smell of love candles and sandlewood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado... | Michael Chabon | ||
| 629b15c | You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough. Abe had not been dressing up, styling himself, for all these years because he was trying to prove how different he was from everyone else. He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else--somewhere, someday--who .. | fatherhood finding-your-people parenting tribes | Michael Chabon | |
| e078ae4 | He brought down Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat, then grabbed an omnibus volume of Dick. "And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight." Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance" | Laura Lippman | ||
| fbeb4f0 | it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you. | Michael Chabon |