Top 200 Michael Chabon Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member – if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.”

— Michael Chabon

52. “It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.”

— Michael Chabon

53. “Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.”

— Michael Chabon

54. “The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.”

— Michael Chabon

55. “A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”

— Michael Chabon

56. “Sammy felt... that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.”

— Michael Chabon

57. “When I finish a first draft, it’s always just as much of a mess as it’s always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.”

— Michael Chabon

58. “His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.”

— Michael Chabon

59. “A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.”

— Michael Chabon

60. “No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.”

— Michael Chabon

61. “They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.”

— Michael Chabon

62. “I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.”

— Michael Chabon

63. “I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.” Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.”

— Michael Chabon

64. “And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.”

— Michael Chabon

65. “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

66. “I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.”

— Michael Chabon

67. “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

68. “The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.”

— Michael Chabon

69. “Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?”

— Michael Chabon

70. “A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.”

— Michael Chabon

71. “My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.”

— Michael Chabon

72. “The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church’s religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.”

— Michael Chabon

73. “I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.”

— Michael Chabon

74. “I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”

— Michael Chabon

75. “See you in the funny papers,” he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.”

— Michael Chabon

76. “He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance – that was all.”

— Michael Chabon

77. “She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”

— Michael Chabon

78. “Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!”

— Michael Chabon

79. “It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.”

— Michael Chabon

80. “I don’t do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don’t really like to be foisted upon.”

— Michael Chabon

81. “All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.”

— Michael Chabon

82. “It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.”

— Michael Chabon

83. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

84. “People keep saying, ‘Oh, you’re getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.’ I guess it does, but mostly it’s just a relief.”

— Michael Chabon

85. “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.”

— Michael Chabon

86. “I don’t like to lose control of my emotions.”

— Michael Chabon

87. “I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It’s a devastating novel.”

— Michael Chabon

88. “Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.”

— Michael Chabon

89. “Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.”

— Michael Chabon

90. “Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.”

— Michael Chabon

91. “I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.”

— Michael Chabon

92. “She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”

— Michael Chabon

93. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

94. “He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

— Michael Chabon

95. “It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.”

— Michael Chabon

96. “The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.”

— Michael Chabon

97. “It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can’t really make a summer day last forever. A home run can’t really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day.”

— Michael Chabon

98. “I don’t save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.”

— Michael Chabon

99. “For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. I think it’s just a natural human response to loss.”

— Michael Chabon

100. “When he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts.”

— Michael Chabon