I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.
Michael ChabonRead
All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Male friendships are often based on shared adventures and ideals, but are fleeting and can become superficial.
This quote by Michael Chabon highlights the nature of male friendships as often being romanticized and idealized, akin to the knights of old chasing after glory and adventure. The imagery of polishing a helmet and riding a donkey suggests that these friendships require effort and a willingness to pursue shared, sometimes unrealistic, goals, indicating that such relationships are often transient and dependent on mutual enthusiasm for adventure.
Themes
FriendshipMale BondsAdventureGloryTransience
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of male camaraderie at a men's retreat.
More from Michael Chabon
All quotes →A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
Michael ChabonRead
I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Michael ChabonRead
It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
Michael ChabonRead
[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.
Michael ChabonRead
You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
Michael ChabonRead
Similar quotes
This group had a kind of dark glamour within the castle. They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty.
J. K. RowlingRead
We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world.
Hannah ArendtRead
You're brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don't care if you are imaginary.
Neil GaimanRead
It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
Henry Ward BeecherRead
The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other... but to be with each other.
Christopher McdougallRead
I take friendship very seriously.
Wole SoyinkaRead