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
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on how stories combine pain and humor to explore the complexities of life.
Michael Chabon emphasizes the profound nature of storytelling through Merrill Feitell's work, illustrating how classic short stories encapsulate the bittersweet essence of human experience. They are crafted from the raw and often painful realities of existence while simultaneously hinting at the yearning for a brighter future, blending the sorrowful and the humorous to convey deep truths about life.
Themes
StoriesLifePainHumorHopeExperience
In practice
Example use cases
Referencing this quote during a literature class to discuss the depth of short stories.
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
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.
Alan PatonRead
To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
Pat ConroyRead
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
Roland BarthesRead
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen KingRead
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
Ken LiuRead
The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
Billy CollinsRead