Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

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.

He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.

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.

This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.

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.

It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.