Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys (1995)

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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
Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. I had one fragrant ounce of Humboldt County, California, in a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment of my car.

Michael Chabon
The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

Michael Chabon
All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.

Michael Chabon
The whiskey tasted like bear steaks and river mud and the flesh of an oak tree. I had another swallow because it tasted so good.

Michael Chabon
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
Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the job as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn't, I might as well have.

Michael Chabon
The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for parts that sound true.

Michael Chabon
Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member—if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains.

Michael Chabon
It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Michael Chabon
He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

Michael Chabon
As a lifelong habit of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy...

Michael Chabon
... as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.

Michael Chabon
"I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel.

Michael Chabon
I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a 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
Her ankles were wobbling in her tall black pumps, and I saw that it could not be an easy thing to be a drunken transvestite.

Michael Chabon
She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

Michael Chabon
I don't mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.

Michael Chabon
Her style was plain and poetic as rain on a daisy—she was particularly gifted at the description of empty land and horses. She lived in the basement of my house for a hundred dollars a month, and I was desperately in love with her.

Michael Chabon
Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Michael Chabon
I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home.

Michael Chabon
A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.

Michael Chabon
Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when
they are alone.

Michael Chabon
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
It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder—from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.

Michael Chabon
If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.

Michael Chabon
Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.

Michael Chabon
The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.

Michael Chabon
There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

Michael Chabon
Eight solid light-years of lead... is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.

Michael Chabon