424 Quotes by Michael Chabon

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.

But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.

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.

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