Quotes From "City On Fire" By 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

But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside. Garth Risk Hallberg

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

William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy- Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head. 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

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

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

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

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

You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday. Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

Failure is so much more interesting. 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

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

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

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

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

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

Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true. 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

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference. Garth Risk Hallberg

America isn’t that far from totalitarianism. Garth Risk Hallberg

I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer–that's his name, my ex–and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned? Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

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