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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Michael Chabon

When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

Science, Writing, Fantasy

Louis Pasteur said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ If you’re really engaged in the writing, you’ll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

Work, Writing, Mind

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that’s my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

World, Think, Place

A father is a man who fails every day.

fatherhood, parenting

[My dad] didn’t do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn’t take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn’t make the appointments. He didn’t shop for my clothes. He didn’t make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.

father, mother, parent, parenting

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child’s perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.

One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man’s life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker.

The baby, not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. ‘What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?’ The baby, understanding perhaps it was purely rhetorical, made no attempt to answer this question.

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

humorous, insightful

For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.

deduction, mystery, sherlock-holmes

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn’t Lasker. This guy-‘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.

beautiful, detective, love, mystery, noir, reconciliation

As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing–common enough among the inventors of heroes–to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake.