The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness Michael Chabon More Quotes by Michael Chabon More Quotes From Michael Chabon [Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying but entirely bogus rumble of pleasure. Michael Chabon pleasure mind cards As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. Michael Chabon sacrifice expression self No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief. Michael Chabon again-and-again ruined belief Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself. Michael Chabon failing moments trying Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle. Michael Chabon rust fire weather I said, “I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.” Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox. Michael Chabon jukebox song needs I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. Michael Chabon destiny home morning I have confused ideas of deity, heavily influenced by mind-altering years of reading science fiction, that do not often trouble me, but one thing I know for certain, and have known since the age of five or six, is that I really can't stand the God of Abraham. In fact, I consider him to constitute the pattern to which every true asshole I have ever known in my life has pretty well conformed. Michael Chabon confused reading years What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene. Michael Chabon powerful inspiration art Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. Michael Chabon powerful flower lying The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike. Michael Chabon were-meant-to-be prison world In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. Michael Chabon new-york dream book He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged. Michael Chabon lurking fugitive soul 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 pittsburgh poet father I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together. Michael Chabon four together character I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. Michael Chabon entering falling-in-love men I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I'm thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious. Michael Chabon two people thinking 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 kids book art That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution. Michael Chabon ready idaho writing A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment. Michael Chabon fulfilled disappointment half
