Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes & Sayings

I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities. — Garth Risk Hallberg

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Which is to say: a city boy, definitively. He knew exactly which spot on which subway platform corresponded with which staircase on which other platform. — 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

MERCER USED TO PASS THE TIME, during his post-grad months of flipping burgers out on Route 17, by polishing his opinions on life and literature for that future date when they would grace the pages of The Paris Review. — Garth Risk Hallberg

THERE WAS NOWHERE ON EARTH more desolate than a Gristedes on New Year's Eve. — Garth Risk Hallberg

A funny thing about charisma: the same people who can make you feel an inch tall can also make you feel huge, fortified, sometimes almost simultaneously. — Garth Risk Hallberg

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I happen to be the kind of reader who, if I like something, I don't want it to end. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Pulaski had never been one for the overwrought plot; any entanglement he could imagine between these two lines of evidence was willful to the point of insanity. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Mercer looked around. There was no way anyone could hear. But the walls could, and the earth, and the ghosts of horses, and the state of Georgia. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I don't have anything against therapy, by the way; it's great for other people. It's just that, personally, I see the enterprise as proceeding from the same premises that cause the problems it seeks to treat. For you guys, what I am, fundamentally, is a closed system, a container of ego and id and biological imperatives. That I'm not may be a fiction, but if I can't imagine a reference point larger than myself, morally speaking, then what's the use? — Garth Risk Hallberg

As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout. — Garth Risk Hallberg

When you were young, you had the resources to rebuild after each crater fate blasted in your life. Beyond a certain age, though, you could only wall off the damage and leave it there. — Garth Risk Hallberg

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this. — Garth Risk Hallberg

It occurs to me that what adulthood actually is is the problem of what one wants to constrain oneself to. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery, — Garth Risk Hallberg

Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent to this one, claimed his life. As if he was his own ghost, standing slightly behind himself, observing. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Impingement, in other words, is all around, and this freedom business is much messier than it looks at first blush. — Garth Risk Hallberg

These are your peak earning years, my friend. You've got kids to think about. And soon enough, alimony. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? — Garth Risk Hallberg

Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself. — Garth Risk Hallberg

At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik. — 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

I couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren't an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Keith was no Franciscan, and it seemed to him an act of narcissism to feed pigeons, who would if anything outlast us. — Garth Risk Hallberg

For it was only with her that he'd ever felt that powerful powerlessness he knew was love. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell. — 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

I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The other kids at school seemed to carry some inner map of where they were going, who they were becoming, that stabilized them through all the outward transformations, but Richard, the world's first 6'3" thirteen-year-old, felt as if he'd been cast into the wilderness without so much as a stick of gum. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Had music not delivered Richard, too, on more than one occasion, from a life he'd believed himself trapped in? The tempos had changed, but that almost didn't matter. The point, now as then, was to tune in to something bigger than yourself, and to feel around you others who felt as you did. — 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

When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. — Garth Risk Hallberg

And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? — Garth Risk Hallberg

It was as if, Pulaski sometimes thought, the '60s had tipped the entire country on end and shaken it like a box of cereal until all the flakes ended up in the East Village. — 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

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

Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and being able to see and recognize other kindred spirits. My dad was a writer, too, which also likely had something to do with that. — Garth Risk Hallberg

A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I don't see the point of a Messiah who sends you to hell. — Garth Risk Hallberg

But was it Faulkner who said that the past was not even past? — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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 — Garth Risk Hallberg

I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I associated excellence in writing with New York City. — 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

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry. — 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

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy- — Garth Risk Hallberg

I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world. — Garth Risk Hallberg

No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty? — Garth Risk Hallberg

For paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Love, as Mercer had heretofore understood it, involved huge gravitational fields of duty and disapproval bearing down on the parties involved, turning even small-talk into a ragged struggle for breath. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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. — Garth Risk Hallberg

He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment. — Garth Risk Hallberg

You couldn't trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday. — Garth Risk Hallberg

It was almost Christmas, and a Santa Claus in a vacant lot was offering to appear in pictures for five dollars. The trim on his suit was mangy, as if it had been dug out of a dumpster, yet young mothers queued ten deep on the sidewalk, holding the hands of kids waiting to get in. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book - you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego. — Garth Risk Hallberg

anglepoise lamp. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I don't think you can really change anything unless you're willing to say yes. — Garth Risk Hallberg

No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all? — Garth Risk Hallberg

Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid. — 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

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?' — Garth Risk Hallberg

Definitely, something is happening out there in Internet world at any given moment, but the likelihood that it's something that can't wait until that evening for you to find out about it is very small. — Garth Risk Hallberg

If you throw a banana at a wall, there's a small possibility that it will pass through the wall. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading. — Garth Risk Hallberg

And she learned that you couldn't stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Like what?" "Like this. I can feel you like beaming anxiety at me. — Garth Risk Hallberg

And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know - the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table - which you, specifically, is the real one? — 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

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

Sometimes you weren't yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone? — Garth Risk Hallberg

Sitting in an armchair under yellow lamplight in front of a black window in an apartment whose only other light was the milky rainbow of the Wurlitzer, Richard was like a giant, welcoming ear. Or a reflecting device, beaming her best self back at her. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Maybe the siren was was a fire truck? Mercer couldn't see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. Bernard of the metaphysical, he couldn't quite let go of the belief that there must be an objective reality out there, beyond his own head. — Garth Risk Hallberg

There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Would anyone else ever find him attractive? Would he be able to trust them? Would he ever make love again, or even want to? And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die? (And — Garth Risk Hallberg

This immoral system, how do you get outside it? Option one, you drop out, sever the connections. They got that far in '68, okay? People went as far with that as they could, to say, I'm free, you're free, kumbaya and barbaric yawp and yadda yadda, and look what happened. The problem with the whole Rousseau trip is that man is primordially a social animal, in the sense of clan or tribe. Marx says this somewhere. You detach completely, you not only find yourself way out on a limb, against your nature, but you've lost any power for group resistance. And eventually, you come crawling back, clutching credit-card applications, begging to be let in. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Some young man has wronged you, hasn't he?' From a person who renounced on principle the possibility of transcendental morality, she thought, it was an interesting choice of words.

'None of them's stuck around long enough to wrong me, Bruno.'

He waved a hand dismissively. 'Romance is a fiction anyway. A myth to sell greeting cards.' Still, he seemed ready, given a name and address, to go challenge the malefactor, like some feudal-era father defending his daughter's chastity. This was all in the eyes, of course. The rest of the face stayed perfectly composed. — Garth Risk Hallberg

No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you'll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its forcefield of sadness. — Garth Risk Hallberg