424 Quotes by Michael Chabon

Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother’s question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.

All the preparation in the world doesn’t avail you if you can’t make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you’ve created, to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.

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.

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.

To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he.

The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.

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

Zugzwang. It’s when you have no good moves. But you still have to move.

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 attribute to me when they read what I have written.