Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

“You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“What would Walt Whitman do?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red on a cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things you don't want to get through.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he's doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own . . . he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is 'remember' even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn't stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn't.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“How to break this to him. How to let a thing be broken.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were perfectly calculated to jam his circuits. Well, you know, we've already booked you a seat on the first manned spaceflight, but I suppose if you have an internship . . .”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Amid them and amid the obdurate angels and the wildflowers pushing up through the earth, Richard could again be one among many.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“But porca miseria, the things night can do to time. In place of hardwired sequence, it's more like everything all mixed up.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's come from might as well not be there.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that's his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“You remember that saying, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' There's something awful about that saying.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“He's moving with such purpose that William is scared he might just speed right off the rooftop, like the roadrunner from the cartoons. Or (the image comes with Magritteish lucidity) spread his arms and flap up into another life.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire