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Book: Manhood for Amateurs
Quotes of Book: Manhood for Amateurs

Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed-all I have ever needed-was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit,"
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man's life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discrete eras-the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower years, the Sixties. Such periods can never be honestly articulated without recourse to so many demurrals and arbitrary demarcations, and the granting of so many exceptions, as to render them practically useless for any kind of serious historical purpose. In times of supposed license, repression reigns freely all around; in eras renowned for their conventionality, oddballs and freaks hoist their banners high.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map -marked HERE THERE BE TYGERS and MEAN KID WITH AIR RIFLE-that he or she has been able to construct out of patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighbourhood children.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
...it had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered--what matters so often in the course of everyday human life--were the surfaces and the joins.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon," said the kid, gravely mistaken.
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Michael Chabon _ Manhood for Amateurs
If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late!
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