Michael Chabon Quotes

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.

I knew that it wouldn’t last. It was just a moment, a perfect moment, as time stood still and fleetingly everything fell back into its proper place.

We have been conditioned to see the passing of time as an adversary.

Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.

Nothing is so good it lasts eternally. Perfect situations must go wrong. But this has never yet prevented me wanting far too much for far too long.

A moment is all you can expect from perfection.

A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.

Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

Gardening is peaceful, yet there is a great element of failure. It's the perfect metaphor for life -- a lot of pleasure, then it's over. There's great satisfaction in tending something, feeling it needs you, even if it's just a plant on your windowsill.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

All beliefs will crash somewhere. Only reality will sustain itself.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.

And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes - you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

A song is like a picture of a bird in flight; the bird was moving before the picture was taken, and no doubt continued after.

A box of new crayons! Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments and the will to choose what will bring about more perfect moments.