Garth Risk Hallberg, City On Fire Quotes
That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.
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.
And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.
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.
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.
The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?
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.
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.
Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.
Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.
Actual artists are like mythological creatures, ' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.
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.
The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.
This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.
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.
As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?
And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?
There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.
Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.
Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-
No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.
Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.
As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.
You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.
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.
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.
It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.
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.
When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.
Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.
Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
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.
