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 Kavalier 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
This above all: to thine own self be true.
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William Shakespeare
What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.
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Helen Keller
One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
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Hermann Hesse
Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft. The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather. Gutman: That may be true. But what can you do about it? Byron: Make a departure. Gutman: From yourself? Byron: From my...
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Tennessee Williams
Most people spend their whole lives waging war–against people they don't even know. And against themselves, whom they know least of all." from BETWEEN TWO DESERTS
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Germaine Shames
More Quotes By Michael Chabon
There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness
Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was...
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...
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...
