I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in… - Michael Chabon

A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.

[L]ook at yourself right now... hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books. … It makes me want to laugh.

Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself