Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Chabon

Fear is treated here less like a crisis than a toll booth: you pay it, you pass through. Chabon’s opening clause, “So it was scary,” has the shrug of lived experience, the emotional equivalent of clearing your throat before telling the real story. The bluntness matters. It refuses melodrama, which makes the fear feel more credible - not a performative terror, but the ordinary panic that shadows any leap into the unknown: a book, a life change, a love, a reinvention.

“But that’s how it goes” is the sleight of hand. The phrase naturalizes uncertainty as the price of admission. Chabon isn’t romanticizing risk; he’s normalizing it, suggesting that the scary part isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, it’s evidence you’re actually doing something. The subtext is almost instructional: stop reading fear as prophecy.

Then the sentence pivots on pleasure: “To my great delight.” Delight is a deliberately old-fashioned word, and it lands like relief with sparkle. It implies surprise, a gift rather than a guarantee. The final claim - “I discovered that it did all belong” - is the emotional thesis. The emphasis on “did” hints at prior doubt, maybe even a sense of impostorhood, as if the pieces of self or work were scattered and suspect until experience proved otherwise.

In Chabon’s larger orbit as a novelist of longing, genre-blending, and earned wonder, “belong” is doing double duty: artistic coherence and personal legitimacy. The line sells a quiet faith in meaning-making - not that the world hands you a pattern, but that you can live into one.