# Michael Chabon - Quotes: 51 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon ## Books - [Gentlemen of the Road](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/gentlemen-of-the-road.md) — 2 quotes - [The Mysteries of Pittsburgh](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh.md) — 25 quotes - [Wonder Boys](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/wonder-boys.md) — 24 quotes ## Recently added quotes > One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering. > > "Why are you afraid?" I said. > > "I don't know. Because vampires are so beautiful," she said. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/one-night-there.md) > The most immediately memorable feature of the decor was the carpeting. A "soothing," embarrassingly synthetic flavor of sky blue, it illuminated the whole floor of the place, like a lit ceiling; and so from my first minute in Jane's house I felt subliminally but undeniably upside down. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/the-most-immediately.md) > All at once I liked him, his firm grace with others, his unlikely modesty, the exotic parties he attended. The desire to befriend him came over me suddenly and certainly, and, as I debated and decided not to shake his hand again, I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I'd been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/all-at-once.md) > As a child, coming home at sunset through the infinite chain of backyards that led from the schoolyard to our house, I would catch glimpses in windows of dining rooms, tables set for supper; of crayon drawings tacked to refrigerators, cartons of milk standing on counters; of feet on low hassocks, framed photographs, and empty sofas, all lit by the bland light of the television; and these quickly shifting tableaux, of strange furniture and the lives and families they divulged, would send me into a trance of curiosity. For a long time I thought that one became a spy in order to watch the houses of other people, to be confronted by the simple, wondrous fact of other kitchens, other clocks, and ottomans. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/as-a-child.md) > My first thirteen years, years of ecstatic, uncomfortable, and speechless curiosity, followed by six months of disaster and disappointment, convinced me somehow that every new friend came equipped with a terrific secret, which one day, deliberately, he would reveal: I need only maintain a discreet, adoring, and fearful silence. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/my-first-thirteen.md) > Some compulsiveness inherited from my father, and also a kind of unnecessary delicacy, had always driven me to keep friends separate, to shun group excursions, but for this calm couple of weeks at the eye of the summer I felt free of the guilt that usually accompanied my juggling of friendships, and free of the sense of duplicity that went along with pushing the people I loved into separate corners of my life, and once in a while Phlox, Arthur, and I would eat our lunches on the same patch of grass. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/some-compulsiveness-inherited.md) > There was, however, a last paper on Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess, for which I realized I would have to make one exasperating last visit to the library, the dead core of my education, the white, silent kernel of every empty Sunday I had spent trying to ravish the faint charms of the study of economics, my sad, cynical major. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/there-was-however.md) > Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the aftershower air, can be, in the wake of a catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful routine. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/riding-on-a-city.md) > She was unquestionably beautiful, and yet there was something odd, wrong, about her looks, her clothing: something a little too, from her too blue eyes in their too direct stare to the too red stockings she wore. It was as though she had studied American notions of beauty from some great distance and had come all this way only to find she had overdone the details: a debutante from another planet. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/she-was-unquestionably.md) > When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness;and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/when-i-remember.md) > I saw that I'd been mistaken when I thought of myself as a Wall, because a wall stands between, and holds apart, two places, two worlds, whereas, if anything, I was nothing but a portal, ever widening, along a single obscure corridor that ran all the way from my mother and father to Cleveland, Arthur, and Phlox, from the beautiful Sunday morning on which my mother had abandoned me, to the unimaginable August that now, for the first time, began to loom. And a wall says no; a portal doesn't say anything. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/i-saw-that.md) > "As long as bars continue to serve pickled eggs," he said, licking his fingers, "there is reason to hope." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michael-chabon/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh/as-long-as-bars.md)