Hallberg Quotes & Sayings

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

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head. — Garth Risk Hallberg

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted? — Garth Risk Hallberg

The Lonliest Man in the World, she said, only has room in his heart for one person, and if he can't have that person, he locks himself away. He tells himself no one could possibly love him, but really, it's that he refuses to love anyone else. — 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

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

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

Infinite Jest not only says that being human is hard work; it makes us work hard. It not only suggests we put ourselves in service to something larger than ourselves; it is one of those larger somethings. That's its rhetorical genius, and is how Wallace gets his self-help "to fly at such a high altitude": Like AA, it is theory and praxis in a single stroke. Or: It is what it says, which may be the purest form of art. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I sew my own shoes. Other male dancers don't, but I like it one way, and I've learned to do it that way. — David 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

Sing, Muse, of high, molded ceilings and built-in bookcases chockablock with hardcovers! Sing of armchairs with scarlet upholstery and highboys lacquered like mirrors and the elegant shadows of potted palms! Sing of a chandelier made entirely of antlers! Of what looked to be a genuine Matisse on the wall above the hearth! — 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

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

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

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

You don't have to subject yourself to the sweep and rigor of Bourdieu's book 'Distinction' to feel how thoroughly a lower-calorie version of its ideas has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Ballet is incestuous. This world is smaller than small. — David Hallberg

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

I'd been coming to New York for weekends since I was 17, and after 9/11, I started making these trips more frequently, just to make contact with the city. — 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

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream. — Garth Risk Hallberg

this is what happens to people when they spend their entire life inside books + never come out: real life starts to grate by comparison. — 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

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

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

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

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

A CHRISTMAS TREE was coming up Eleventh Avenue. Or rather, was trying to come; having tangled itself in a shopping cart someone had abandoned in the crosswalk, it shuddered and bristled and heaved, on the verge of bursting into flame. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Love is everyone's blind spot. Or love and fear. — Garth Risk Hallberg

It swept him forward, and though the crowd grew denser with every step - his advance was checked several yards short of the stage by a wall of spike-studded leather jackets - he was now closer than he had ever been to live music, save for at his bar mitzvah. The sheer monophonic power of this sound blew away any impression those tuxed fucks had left. It was an avalanche, hurtling downhill, snapping trees and houses like tinkertoys, taking up every sound in its path and obliterating it in a white roar. As Charlie felt himself being taken up into it, totally, unable to decide whether it was good or bad - unable, even, to care. — Garth Risk Hallberg

And of course, being a gentleman, he let her go first, not that there was any kind of thank-you. — Garth Risk Hallberg

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. — 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

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

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

In Shakespeare, tragedy was the flame struck from the clash of moral principles; here — Garth Risk Hallberg

I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural. — Garth Risk Hallberg

For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn't even met. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

It was as if the birds were caught in the repetition of some primal trauma, stuck between what they had and what they wanted. — 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

Russians are very discerning about ballet. They're very opinionated about what classical ballet is. — David Hallberg

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? — Garth Risk Hallberg

It's a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too. — Garth Risk Hallberg

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

anglepoise lamp. — Garth Risk Hallberg

There are certainly some artists in New York that I would love to work with. One is Sarah Michelson. — David 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

But I guess what I would want to leave each of you with finally -- tender some Evidence of, against a life's worth of signs to the contrary -- comes down simply to this: You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone. — Garth Risk Hallberg

When I went to Moscow, I felt I was relearning Swan Lake - which was written for the Bolshoi - and being immersed in a tradition and history I had never experienced. It took a while to adjust to living there and learning the language, but now I have lots of friends. I get the best of two completely different worlds. — David 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

THE THING WAS, William had a kind of genius for not noticing what he didn't want to notice. — Garth Risk Hallberg

She'd believed in the promises of the '60s, after all, even if she'd participated only indirectly. Hadn't they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they'd made at twenty? — Garth Risk Hallberg

And people in love are not to be trusted. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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? BOOK — 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

But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Someone else shoved a pencil in your hand and aimed you in the direction of a burning building somewhere and told you not to come back without a quote from the fire marshall, kid, and that was it: you were a reporter. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I'll never be satisfied in classical ballet. It'll never be good enough. I'll never be happy with most of my product. — David Hallberg

I'm not one who goes to a lot of fashion shows or tries to infiltrate that world, really. — David Hallberg

I started coming up to New York at age 17. There was a girl I met over the summer somewhere; I was chasing her. I would drive up to D.C., where I had made some friends, which was about four hours away, and we would take the bus up to New York. — 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 writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

The four food groups of bachelorhood: Frozen, Cold Cuts, Breakfast Cereal, and Takeout. — 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

This isn't Soviet Russia. This is America we're talking about. For God's sake, this is New York City. — Garth Risk Hallberg

IN NEW YORK, you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I'm operating on. — Garth Risk Hallberg

You knew it just to look at them, the doughy brown bourgeois, the wiry pale punk: What could possibly have yoked these two together, besides the occult power of sex? — 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

I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household. — Garth Risk Hallberg

No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the grand finale until it's over. And at that point, wherever one is, one won't ever really have been anywhere else. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Three's all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Every company has its style, and that's what makes the Bolshoi so impressive: their attack on jumps or their attack on choreography. — David Hallberg

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

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

When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least. — Garth Risk Hallberg