City On Fire Quotes
City On Fire Quote of the day
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.
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.
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.
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.
That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.
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.
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.
Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.
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.
Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
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.
As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.
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.
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.
And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?
