Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. 'There's no one I'd rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,' William said.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

America isn’t that far from totalitarianism.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me?

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

There were two options—call the foul or don't—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he'd been doing for months now with every last person he loved.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope?

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Did you really think I'd steer you wrong? Then William pointed to the wide-open country beyond the next ridge. New York's that way. My compass is unerring.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's gonna sit down and listen to the entire 'Essential Billy Joel.'

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg