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The Thing That Strikes Me Now When I Think About The Wilderness Of Childhood Is The Incredible Degree Of Freedom My Parents Gave Me To Adventure There. A Very Grave, Very Significant Shift In Our Idea Of Childhood Has Occurred Since Then. The Wilderness Of Childhood Is Gone; The Days Of Adventure Are Past. The Land Ruled By Children, To Which A Kid Might Exile Himself For At Least Some Portion Of Every Day From The Neighboring Kingdom Of Adulthood, Has In Large Part Been Taken Over, Co-opted, Colonized, And Finally Absorbed By The Neighbors.

-Michael Chabon

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The Thing That Strikes

Michael Chabon

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The Thing That Strikes Me Now When I Think About The Wilderness Of Childhood Is The Incredible Degree Of Freedom My Parents Gave Me To Adventure There. A Very Grave, Very Significant Shift In Our Idea Of Childhood Has Occurred Since Then. The Wilderness Of Childhood Is Gone; The Days Of Adventure Are Past. The Land Ruled By Children, To Which A Kid Might Exile Himself For At Least Some Portion Of Every Day From The Neighboring Kingdom Of Adulthood, Has In Large Part Been Taken Over, Co-opted, Colonized, And Finally Absorbed By The Neighbors.

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Black And White

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Take Care-there Is No Force More Powerful Than That Of An Unbridled Imagination.

There's Nothing More Embarrassing Than To Have Earned The Disfavor Of A Perceptive Animal.

He Was A Fugitive, Lurking Soul, James Leer. He Didn't Belong Anywhere, But Things Went Much Better For Him In Places Where Nobody Belonged.

Forget About What You Are Escaping From. Reserve Your Anxiety For What You Are Escaping To.

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The Magician Seemed To Promise That Something Torn To Bits Might Be Mended Without A Seam, That What Had Vanished Might Reappear, That A Scattered Handful Of Doves Or Dust Might Be Reunited By A Word, That A Paper Rose Consumed By Fire Could Be Made To Bloom From A Pile Of Ash. But Everyone Knew That It Was Only An Illusion. The True Magic Of This Broken World Lay In The Ability Of Things It Contained To Vanish, To Become So Thoroughly Lost, That They Might Never Have Existed In The First Place.

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The Truth Of Some Promises Is Not As Important As Whether Or Not You Can Believe In Them, With All Your Heart.

I Thought, I Fanced, That In A Moment, I Would Be Standing On Nothing At All, And For The First Time In My Life, I Needed The Wings None Of Us Has.

. . .i Really Ought To Have Recognized It For What It Was And, Perhaps, To Have Stopped Right There - For It Was Nostalgia, And What Inspires Nostalgia Has Been Dead A Long Time

Man Makes Plans . . . And God Laughs.

I Was Thinking, Too, Of Superman And His Fortress Of Solitude.

[i]n 1938, Superman Appeared. He Had Been Mailed To The Offices Of National Periodical Publications From Cleveland, By A Couple Of Jewish Boys Who Had Imbued Him With The Powers Of A Hundred Men, Of A Distant World, And Of The Full Measure Of Their Bespectacled Adolescent Hopefulness And Desperation.

The World Like Our Heads Was Meant To Be Escaped From, They Are Prisons World And Head Alike.

Were Meant To Be

Horror Grows Impatient, Rhetorically, With The Stoic Fatalism Of Ecclesiastes. That We Are All Going To Die, That Death Mocks And Cancels Every One Of Our Acts And Attainments And Every Moment Of Our Life Histories, This Knowledge Is To Storytelling What Rust Is To Oxidation; The Writer Of Horror Holds With Those Who Favor Fire. The Horror Writer Is Not Content To Report On Death As The Universal System Of Human Weather; He Or She Chases Tornadoes. Horror Is Stoicism With A Taste For Spectacle.

When I'm Writing Solitude Feels Very Good. But When I'm Not Writing It Feels Lonely... Having A Big Family Solves That Problem.

If Children Are Not Permitted-not Taught-to Be Adventurers And Explorers As Children, What Will Become Of The World...?

There Are No Moments More Painful For A Parent Than Those In Which You Contemplate Your Child's Perfect Innocence Of Some Imminent Pain, Misfortune, Or Sorrow. That Innocence (like Every Kind Of Innocence Children Have) Is Rooted In Their Trust Of You, One That You Will Shortly Be Obliged To Betray; Whether It Is Fair Or Not, Whether You Can Help It Or Not, You Are Always The Ultimate Guarantor Or Destroyer Of That Innocence.

I Can Imagine Anything Except Having No Imagination.

Bina, Thank You. Bina, Listen, This Guy. His Name Wasn't Lasker. This Guy-' She Puts A Hand To His Mouth. She Has Not Touched Him In Three Years. It Probably Would Be Too Much To Say That He Feels The Darkness Lift At The Touch Of Her Fingertips Against His Lips. But It Shivers, And Light Bleeds In Among The Cracks.

Miracles Prove Nothing Except To Those Whose Faith Is Bought Very Cheap, Sir.

He Is By Nature A Vegetarian But Would Never Consider Giving Up Meat.

To Me, Clark Kent In A Phone Booth And Houdini In A Packing Crate, They Were One And The Same Thing," He Would Learnedly Expound At Wondercon Or Angoulême Or To The Editor Of The Comics Journal . "you Weren't The Same Person When You Came Out As When You Went In.

All Novels Are Sequels; Influence Is Bliss.

That's The Best Thing About Writing, When You're In That Zone, You're Porous, Ready To Absorb The Solution.

I’d Spent My Whole Life Waiting To Awake On An Ordinary Morning In The Town That Was Destined To Be My Home, In The Arms Of The Woman I Was Destined To Love, Knowing The People And Doing The Work That Would Make Up The Changing But Essentially Invariable Landscape Of My Particular Destiny.

Jerome Charyn Is One Of The Most Important Writers In American Literature And One Of Only Three Now Writing Whose Work Makes Me Truly Happy To Be A Reader.

... And Because It Was A Drunken Perception, It Was Perfect, Entire, And Lasted About Half A Second.

People Keep Saying, 'oh, You're Getting All These Great Reviews, That Must Make You Really Happy.' I Guess It Does, But Mostly It's Just A Relief.

Entertainment Is A Sacred Pursuit When Done Well. When Done Well, It Raises The Quality Of Human Life.

Every Time Another Review Comes Out I Let Out A Deep Breath.

The Things I Keep Going Back To, Rereading, Maybe They Say More About Me As A Reader Than About The Books. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Pale Fire.

No; He Could Be Ruined Again And Again By Hope, But He Would Never Be Capable Of Belief.

Again And Again

They Lay There For A Few Seconds, In The Dark, In The Future, Listening To The Fabulous Clockwork Of Their Hearts And Lungs, And Loving Each Other

Dr. Roboy, In Litvak's Measured View, Had A Vice Common To Believers: He Was All Strategy And No Tactics. He Was Prone To Move For The Sake Of Moving, Too Focused On The Goal To Bother With The Intervening Sequence.

I Do Have A Collection Of Mid-century, Small-press Science Fiction And Fantasy Hardcovers That Is My Most Focused And Dedicated Collection. Everything Else I Tend More To Acquire Or Amass Than Collect. I Have Vinyl Records I Listen To All The Time When I Work. But I Don’t Collect Records. I Just Buy Records Where The Price Seems Right And It’s Music I Actually Listen To.

The Instructor, Ms. Pease, Also Taught In The Church's Religious School, And She Had A Sunday School Manner At Once Saccharine And Condemnatory.

But The First Lie In The Series Is The One You Make With The Greatest Trepidation And The Heaviest Heart.

Do What You Gotta Do And Stay Fly

A True Storyteller Is Really Good At Writing Himself Into A Corner And Then Finding A Way Out Of That Corner

Novelist Time Is Reptile Time; Novelists Tend To Be Ruminant And Brooding, Nursers Of Ancient Grievances, Second-guessers, Tuesday Afternoon Quarterbacks, Retrospectators, Endlessly, Like Slumping Hitters, Studying The Film Of Their Old Whiffs.

The First And Last Duty Of The Lover Of The Game Of Baseball," Peavine's Book Began, "whether In The Stands Or On The Field, Is The Same As That Of The Lover Of Life Itself: To Pay Attention To It. When It Comes To The Position Of Catcher, As All But Fools And Shortstops Will Freely Acknowledge, This Solemn Requirement Is Doubled.

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