36 quotes
Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.
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.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
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.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in."
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field...
Wonder Boys (1995)
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.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
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.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
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.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.
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.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
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...
Wonder Boys (1995)
[Comics] were viewed as the literary equivalent of bubblegum cards, meant to be poked into the spokes of a young mind where they would produce a satisfying—but entirely bogus—rumble of pleasure.
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.
Wonder Boys (1995)
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.
Wonder Boys (1995)
...as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.
Wonder Boys (1995)
[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land.
The Mysteries of Berkeley (2002)