Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)

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Dr. Roboy, in Litvak's measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence.

Michael Chabon
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

Michael Chabon
The rest of Sitka's homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.

Michael Chabon
He doesn't know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.

Michael Chabon
Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.

Michael Chabon
Yes, all right, Landsman understands, so go shit in the ocean, that he made not the right but the only choice. He understands that the necessity of covering up for the dark deeds of the boys in the top drawer is one that nozzes have been making into a virtue since the dawn of police work.

Michael Chabon
He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.

Michael Chabon
Are you mocking the concept?
Not necessary, Berko says. The concept mocks itself.

Michael Chabon
Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.

Michael Chabon
A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.

Michael Chabon
He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can't flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.

Michael Chabon
Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself

Michael Chabon
The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.

Michael Chabon
He's too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you're a pessimist, all omens are bad.

Michael Chabon
Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

Michael Chabon
Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along just, under their boot, lay the abyss. This is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.

Michael Chabon