Henreid And Hallberg Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate to think of the day when nobody remembers me as an actor and I can't get good tables in restaurants. ~ Paul Henreid

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

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

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 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

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

I never felt Lee Strasberg could act, and I fail to see how someone who can't act can teach acting. ~ Paul Henreid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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? ~ 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

To be honest, my partner Natasha is my inspiration. She is who I reference when searching for my role. I don't emulate what she does, but her interpretation of Giselle is so fragile and sensitive and so tender. It constantly inspires me. And I feel like it's the other way around. We have a great rapport together. ~ David 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many dancers are content with the repertoire they're given. Others are dissatisfied but don't know why. Then there are a few like me that are curious and grab at everything. Can that curiosity thrive in the ballet world, or should it exist elsewhere? That's the eternal question. ~ David 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

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

When I went to Moscow, I felt I was relearning Swan Lake - which was written for the Bolshoi - and being immersed in a tradition and history I had never experienced. It took a while to adjust to living there and learning the language, but now I have lots of friends. I get the best of two completely different worlds. ~ David Hallberg