Michael Chabon Quotes

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.

It's not a party until the fire department shows up.

The thing that scares me is a place like the Amazon - which is the size of the continental U.S. and mostly unexplored and has a different ecosystem, there are so many things in there that can kill you.

A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.

I want to be remembered for Swiss Family Robinson and Old Yeller. I think Swiss is probably my favorite film.

I grew up being told by my parents each time they went off to war that they may explode, so I needed to know how things like the gadgets in the kitchen worked.

Being a family in general is a comedy of errors.

More and more, as civilization develops, we find the primitive to be essential to us. We root into the primitive as a tree roots into the earth. If we cut off the roots, we lose the sap without which we can't progress or even survive. I don't believe our civilization can continue very long out of contact with the primitive.

One can't live in solitude. To survive as a single family unit is not possible.

Having three kids at home is sometimes like dealing with Democrats and Republicans when you're choosing a restaurant.

If you don't have manufactured items or anything we think of as 'civilization,' then you're living according to your species.

Having children is messy and easy to judge.

Once I was hosting an important dinner party at our house - everything was perfect, candles were lit, the house smelled amazing with great food and drinks ready. We lit a fire and the flue wasn't able to open, unbeknownst to us. We smoked out the entire house and the fire department had to come - it was a mess.

Artemis women often have difficult childhoods. She's the kid who seeks comfort in the woods, or animals, or books. If trapped in an authoritarian family, she blends in to get by - but keeps a fierce autonomy inside her head and heart, looking to the day she breaks free.

The family is not only a living arrangement. It has always been a symbol of survival.

Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we're related for better or for worse...and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.

For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

[when asked about what he was most thankful about]: Being alive. After heart surgery, you dig that part. Breath, family and friends are just amazing. Just to have a second shot is pretty great!

There was nothing humane about humanity. At the end of the day, they were all animals with only survival instincts.

You can see the true heart of a man when you're out in the woods with a weapon

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.

That's why I like the scenes where we're just in the kitchen having breakfast, because it's the interaction between people. The chaos.