As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Cavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake.

— Michael Chabon

As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.

— Michael Chabon

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.

— Michael Chabon

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

— Michael Chabon

A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of, and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped.

— Michael Chabon

Badass.'" My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.

— Michael Chabon

Bin, thank you. Bin, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Laser. This guy-'She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

— Michael Chabon

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which broadsword-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORA Josef 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 where 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.

— Michael Chabon

But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bin. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.

— Michael Chabon

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make. The Killer Hook

— Michael Chabon