Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"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."
70 Quotes
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"An actual artist, living right under her nose."
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"America isn’t that far from totalitarianism."
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference."
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?"
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
"Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were."
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling."
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
"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, City on Fire
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