Garth Risk Quotes

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

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

Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

On one hand, you couldn't count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

Sometimes you weren't yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Who didn't exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories? ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

It was possible, suddenly, to separate love from being beholden. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

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

What would Walt Whitman do? ~ 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

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

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past. ~ 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

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

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 ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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? ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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 ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

An actual artist, living right under her nose. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

But was it Faulkner who said that the past was not even past? ~ 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

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. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? ~ 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

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

I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

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

There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe we're just fundamentally destined for unhappiness. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

What people did with their genitals was their business. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I associated excellence in writing with New York City. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

anglepoise lamp. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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