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Telegraph Avenue QUOTES

Telegraph Avenue QUOTES

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

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

2 " It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

3 " He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

4 " Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

5 " Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

6 " Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

7 " The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass to the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

8 " Do what you gotta do and stay fly "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

9 " The evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

10 " Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

11 " He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

12 " A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

13 " Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took-but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

14 " He addressed the class...in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

15 " The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

16 " You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

17 " The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

18 " They had an old-fashioned sincerity...that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

19 " Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue

20 " The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality. "

― Michael Chabon , Telegraph Avenue