Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world.

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.

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.

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.

I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's gonna sit down and listen to the entire 'Essential Billy Joel.'

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

Henry James would probably roll over in his grave if he knew he was in any way responsible for this book.

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.

There was a period just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody got.

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.

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?

Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.

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?

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

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.

The other kids sometimes teased Charlie for being a redheaded Jew,

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.

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.

America isn't that far from totalitarianism.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.

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?

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.

I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years.

One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?

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.

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.

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.

I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to the degree that I ever was, a noticer.

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.

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

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?

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

I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded.

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.

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

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.

There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself.

He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted.

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.

Like what?" "Like this. I can feel you like beaming anxiety at me.

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.

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

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.

Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the type-writer, trying to get back to the book he'd come to New York to write. It was supposed to be about America, and freedom, and the kinship of time to pain, but in order to write about these things, he'd needed experience. Well, be careful what you wish for. For now all he seemed capable of producing was a string of sentences starting, Here was William. Here was William's courage, for example. And here was William's sadness, smallness of stature, size of hands. Here was his laugh in a dark movie theater, his unpunk love of the films of Woody Allen, not for any of the obvious ways they flattered his sensibility, but for something he called their tragic sense, which he compared to Chekhov's (whom Mercer knew he had not read). Here was the way he never asked Mercer about his work; the way he never talked about his own and yet seemed to carry it with him just beneath the skin; the way his skin looked in the sodium light from outside with the light off, with clothes off, in silver rain; the way he embodied qualities Mercer wanted to have, but without ruining them by wanting to have them; the way his genius overflowed its vessel, running off into the drain; the unfinished self-portrait; the hint of some trauma in his past, like the war a shell-shocked town never talks about; his terrible taste in friends; his complete lack of discipline; the inborn incapacity for certain basic things that made you want to mother him, fuc

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

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

Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?

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.

anglepoise lamp.

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

Love is everyone's blind spot. Or love and fear.

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.

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.

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

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.

Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?

And people in love are not to be trusted.

You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.

And she was okay with this not because she was a bad person, but because there was no alternative.

Choice isn't the same thing as freedom - not when someone else is framing the choices for you.

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.

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.

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

THE 1973 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS were held in a flyblown banquet room way up near the Columbia School of Journalism - an area not known for its elegance. Then again, neither were journalists.

Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores.

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.

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.

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!

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?'

What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never been enough to contain. Family, work, romance, church, municipality, history, happenstance ... He wanted to follow the soul far enough out along these lines of relationship to discover that there was no fixed point where one person ended and another began.

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

In Shakespeare, tragedy was the flame struck from the clash of moral principles; here

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.

Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.

It was possible, suddenly, to separate love from being beholden.

What would Walt Whitman do?

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

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

The sound of the white touching down all around him was like the sound of feet behind an arras, or like tiny, glottal laughter, if not of God the father, then perhaps of one of his angels, archangels, principalities, thrones, dominions, powers, seraphs, he'd known them all by heart as a choirboy in Stamford.

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

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

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?

The cushions of my friend's couch were some kind of rubberized velour, the windows were uncurtained, and at five a.m. the birds were all atwitter and the light, the L.A. light everyone goes on and on about, was right in my East Coast eyes. Give me New York any day, I thought. But when New York came, it was with fangs and claws, in a nightmare I now woke from screaming.

That's the place where the books are made, I thought. That's also where Allen Ginsberg offered a friend of mine a Fig Newton outside a deli in the East Village. By the time I first came to New York, I was already half in love.

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.

I associated excellence in writing with New York City.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sing, Muse, of high, moulded ceilings and built-in bookcases chockablock with hardcovers!

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

What people did with their genitals was their business.

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.