Top 100 Garth Risk Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#7. There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#8. 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
#9. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#15. 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
#16. The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#35. Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#36. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#37. Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#39. I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.'
Garth Risk Hallberg
#41. When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#42. 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
#43. I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#44. 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
#45. 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
#48. Impingement, in other words, is all around, and this freedom business is much messier than it looks at first blush.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Or wasn't this city really the sum of every little selfishness, every ignorance, every act of laziness and mistrust and unkindness ever committed by anybody who lived there,
Garth Risk Hallberg
#54. 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
#55. I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website. In the offices, we had banks of TVs, papers, a constant media stream, which was unusual for 2001.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#56. I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#57. I happen to be the kind of reader who, if I like something, I don't want it to end.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#59. As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#60. 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
#61. And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#62. I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#63. 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
#67. For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. For it was only with her that he'd ever felt that powerful powerlessness he knew was love.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#77. 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
#78. What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren't actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#80. Failure isn't failure if a lesson from it's learned. I guess love would not be love without a risk of being burned.
Garth Brooks
#81. This isn't Soviet Russia. This is America we're talking about. For God's sake, this is New York City.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#82. 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
#83. These are your peak earning years, my friend. You've got kids to think about. And soon enough, alimony.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#84. The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#85. And she was okay with this not because she was a bad person, but because there was no alternative.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#86. THE THING WAS, William had a kind of genius for not noticing what he didn't want to notice.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#87. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#88. Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. I don't think you can really change anything unless you're willing to say yes.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#93. And of course, being a gentleman, he let her go first, not that there was any kind of thank-you.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#94. Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#96. 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
#97. Choice isn't the same thing as freedom - not when someone else is framing the choices for you.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#98. IN NEW YORK, you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I'm operating on.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#99. 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
#100. Three's all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Garth Risk Hallberg
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