Top 96 City On Fire Quotes
#1. Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire.
Kelly Link
#2. you. Devlin and I will take our chances on the run." They rode on in silence, speeding west toward Phoenix now, a massive, distant glow on the horizon, like a city on fire.
Blake Crouch
#3. Ours was a city on fire with becoming, the suburbs reaching farther from the core by the week.
Kim Cooper
#4. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#5. 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
#6. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#7. Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#8. Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. And in the city on all sides, the howling of the Hounds rose in an ear-shattering, soul-flailing crescendo. The Lord of Death had arrived, to walk the streets in the City of Blue Fire.
Steven Erikson
#13. Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#14. When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#15. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#16. 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
#17. Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#18. i do not want to have you to fill the empty parts of me i want to be full on my own i want to be so complete i could light a whole city and then i want to have you cause the two of us combined could set it on fire
Rupi Kaur
#19. Cadiz is a city of magic, like Cracow or Dublin, to set the mind on fire at a turn of a corner ... The eye is continually fed, the imagination stirred, by a train of spectacles as charming as if they had been contrived.
Honor Tracy
#20. 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
#22. 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
#24. Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#28. He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#29. Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#30. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#31. 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
#32. One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#33. 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
#34. Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.
Karen Abbott
#35. Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#36. Welcome to Glasgow - the city where we punch people who are on fire.
Frankie Boyle
#37. 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
#38. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.
Melissa Febos
#39. On fire for the Lord," the Yoes began to talk to their friends about Jesus and even went so far as to name their dog "Repent" so they could stand in the city's parks and shout the canine's name and their message at the top of their lungs.
Larry Eskridge
#40. 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
#41. My thighs and hips are on fire. I don't know where I end and you begin.
Amanda Carlson
#42. I was going to put what birthday it was on the sign," he said, "but Jace said that after twenty, you're just old, so it doesn't matter anyway."
Jace stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth.
"I said that?
Cassandra Clare
#43. 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
#44. And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#45. Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#46. As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#47. 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
#49. World's flying like birds; my car's in flight. The city lights are spattered on my windshield like the fragments of the night. And I'm in flight. The sky's a wheel, a merry-go-round of wings and snow and steel, and fire. We'll tread the sky, we'll ride the scarlet horses.
Tanith Lee
#50. Come on," he said.
"Let's get back to Alec before he decides Isabelle and Simon are having sex off in the caves and starts freaking out.
Cassandra Clare
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#53. 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
#54. More things we learned from the Rising: It's hard to gentrify a city that's on fire.
Mira Grant
#56. 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
#57. I'm a known fugitive who likes to set people on fire. Come away with me so we can have hot sex while the entire city is trying to shoot me in the head. If I get bored, I'll barbecue you for my amusement. Sure, let me get my shoes.
Ilona Andrews
#58. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#59. Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#60. Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#62. 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
#63. As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#64. And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#65. Undergarments flapped wildly on the fire escapes above, soiled with sweat and blood: private stains, flying high over the city like crests on the flags of a ship.
Leslie Parry
#66. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#68. They'll probably put that on my gravestone. 'He Was Heterosexul and Had Low Expectations.
Jace Herondale
#69. College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.
James Baldwin
#74. Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#75. 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
#76. Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while.Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal
Cassandra Clare
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#81. I am surprised that Chicago - the Big-Shouldered City - is so trifling that they won't let you eat in a restaurant if it's on fire. Even if you already paid.
Jill Conner Browne
#82. He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#96. 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
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