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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the elusive nature of storytelling, where emotions and beliefs crystallize into lasting memories.
Michael Chabon highlights the process of creating a story as one that begins with vague feelings, where a writer navigates through personal emotions and beliefs. Eventually, these uncertainties transform into significant memories or narratives, akin to how amber preserves ancient moments in time. This metaphor suggests that storytelling captures and preserves human experiences in a tangible form.
Themes
StorytellingMemoriesFeelingsNarrativeArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, to talk about the importance of capturing emotions in stories.
More from Michael Chabon
All quotes →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
The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.
Michael ChabonRead
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