Michael Chabon Quotes

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?

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

[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

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

He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.