Top 100 Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#6. 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.
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#7. I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#8. And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#9. As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#10. 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
#11. Three's all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#12. IN NEW YORK, you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I'm operating on.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#13. Choice isn't the same thing as freedom - not when someone else is framing the choices for you.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#14. 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.
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#15. watch William's beloved sport, but to him televised football was no more interesting, or even narratively intelligible, than a flea circus, so he got up and went to the kitchenette to do the other stations of the Yuletide cross.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#16. 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.
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#17. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
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#18. These are your peak earning years, my friend. You've got kids to think about. And soon enough, alimony.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#19. 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.
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#20. 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
#21. 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.
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#22. He's moving with such purpose that William is scared he might just speed right off the rooftop, like the roadrunner from the cartoons. Or (the image comes with Magritteish lucidity) spread his arms and flap up into another life.
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#23. 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
#24. 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
#26. The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.
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#27. Mercer didn't know, but Lost Illusions was one of his personal favorites. Basically, a young poet from the provinces comes to Paris to make his fortune and, in the fullness of time, discovers that he's been wrong about everything. All the people he takes for geniuses are idiots, and vice versa.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#28. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#29. 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
#30. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.
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#31. 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.
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#32. There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
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#33. 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
#34. A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle,
a darkness - the object or concept holding the visible together.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#35. Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
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#36. It's a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.
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#39. 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
#40. Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself.
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#41. Have you seen The Man Who Fell to Earth?" Charlie's face was hot, his asthma tightening his throat. "I realize that maybe sounds like a metaphor, but you listen to David Bowie, he's thinking about what people will face in the future.
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#42. Fucking holidays, William thought. Occasions to rethink your life, ostensibly, but how were you supposed to do that when other people kept dragging you back toward whoever you used to be?
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#43. 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.
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#44. 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.
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#46. 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.
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#47. You couldn't trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.
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#48. 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
#49. Sing, Muse, of high, moulded ceilings and built-in bookcases chockablock with hardcovers!
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#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. In Shakespeare, tragedy was the flame struck from the clash of moral principles; here
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#59. On one hand, you couldn't count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#60. 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
#61. This was a sometimes attractive and sometimes frustrating wrinkle of the dialectic, she'd found: everything turned out to be the superstructure of some other thing.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. It seemed impossible that he'd chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#68. Amid them and amid the obdurate angels and the wildflowers pushing up through the earth, Richard could again be one among many.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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.
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#73. 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
#74. You can get away with anything right out in the open, so long as you don't look down.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#75. Really, though, he'd snuck back into his skull with tiny wrenches to make the kinds of adjustments that would allow him to continue living this way, with a boyfriend who would walk out on you on Christmas Day.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#76. I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#77. 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
#78. Sometimes you weren't yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#79. 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
#80. And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?
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#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#84. Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#85. Steering between the Scylla of too much and the Charybdis of not-enough, he'd worked hard to project a retiring asexuality. As far as his coworkers knew, he lived with only his books for company. Still, he relished her name in his mouth. "Regan.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#86. 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
#87. 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.
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#89. If you throw a banana at a wall, there's a small possibility that it will pass through the wall.
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#90. If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she's about than I do.
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#91. Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery,
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#92. 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.
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#93. He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.
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#94. 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
#95. In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.
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#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. And I start to feel once more that the lines that have boxed in my life - between past and present, outside and in - are dissolving. That I may yet myself be delivered.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#99. 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.
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#100. William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-
Garth Risk Hallberg
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