Top 200 Michael Chabon Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

102. “It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I’d fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.”

— Michael Chabon

103. “What’s going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I’ll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.”

— Michael Chabon

104. “The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy in our hands. When the first storyteller, having told the first story, fell silent, somebody sitting there by the fire said, “Then what happened?” and the Age of Sequels began.”

— Michael Chabon

105. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

106. “The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.”

— Michael Chabon

107. “While writing, I’ll go anywhere I find that is quiet, has no internet. I have a big internet problem.”

— Michael Chabon

108. “He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat.”

— Michael Chabon

109. “His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.”

— Michael Chabon

110. “He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.”

— Michael Chabon

111. “Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men.”

— Michael Chabon

112. “I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon,” said the kid, gravely mistaken.”

— Michael Chabon

113. “Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.”

— Michael Chabon

114. “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

115. “He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people’s bad decisions along with his own.”

— Michael Chabon

116. “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

117. “Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go.”

— Michael Chabon

118. “There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.”

— Michael Chabon

119. “Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake.”

— Michael Chabon

120. “One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.”

— Michael Chabon

121. “I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I’m still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.”

— Michael Chabon

122. “She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When.”

— Michael Chabon

123. “My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.”

— Michael Chabon

124. “For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.”

— Michael Chabon

125. “All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He’s tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.”

— Michael Chabon

126. “The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all it’s analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.”

— Michael Chabon

127. “I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.”

— Michael Chabon

128. “Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him.”

— Michael Chabon

129. “She had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work.”

— Michael Chabon

130. “Dr. Roboy, in Litvak’s measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence.”

— Michael Chabon

131. “Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.”

— Michael Chabon

132. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

133. “The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike.”

— Michael Chabon

134. “The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.”

— Michael Chabon

135. “Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.”

— Michael Chabon

136. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

137. “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.”

— Michael Chabon

138. “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

— Michael Chabon

139. “He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much – indeed to revolve around him – could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.”

— Michael Chabon

140. “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

141. “Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.”

— Michael Chabon

142. “I’m never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn’t really want to be – not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success – because that’s not why I’m writing novels. I’m doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.”

— Michael Chabon

143. “So it was scary, but that’s how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.”

— Michael Chabon

144. “The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy.”

— Michael Chabon

145. “The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward.”

— Michael Chabon

146. “But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.”

— Michael Chabon

147. “As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn’t intend to keep.”

— Michael Chabon

148. “It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls.”

— Michael Chabon

149. “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

150. “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.”

— Michael Chabon