{"author":"Michael Chabon","author_id":"Michael+Chabon","total_quotes":74,"quotes":[{"text":"[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.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["busstations","luck"],"id":3022,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["paper-cut","smile"],"id":16917,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"… remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["boy","ghost","light","memory","vision"],"id":24963,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"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.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["ghosts"],"id":36137,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' 'Melissa,' it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole 'soul' question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["age","death","mortality","religion","soul"],"id":43814,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. 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. Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. The adept handles the rich material, the rank river clay, and diligently intones his alphabetical spells, knowing full well the history of golems: how they break free of their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power, refuse to be controlled. In the same way, the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a little world that, like God’s, is at once terribly imperfect and filled with astonishing life.Originally published in The Washington Post Book World.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["clay","creation","fear","truth","writing"],"id":47340,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["notes","writing"],"id":49407,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["love","nostalgia"],"id":51698,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone's head, he figured; in my grandmother's case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adapation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["dilusional","mental-illness","moonglow","strength","survival"],"id":59196,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"},{"text":"The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.","author":"Michael Chabon","tags":["antarctica","lonliness","madness","the-ice"],"id":79612,"author_id":"Michael+Chabon"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":74,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}