garth-risk-hallberg Quotes About city-on-fire Page 2

“He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted.”

Premonition Sixth Sense City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Being Watched

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Conflict Confrontation City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Author:Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Family Compromise City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Repressed Feelings

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.”

Description City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“An actual artist, living right under her nose.”

Artist City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“Pulaski had never been one for the overwrought plot; any entanglement he could imagine between these two lines of evidence was willful to the point of insanity.”

Plot City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Meta Sly Humor

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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?”

Time Ghosts City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.”

Humor College City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“Some young man has wronged you, hasn't he?' From a person who renounced on principle the possibility of transcendental morality, she thought, it was an interesting choice of words. 'None of them's stuck around long enough to wrong me, Bruno.' He waved a hand dismissively. 'Romance is a fiction anyway. A myth to sell greeting cards.' Still, he seemed ready, given a name and address, to go challenge the malefactor, like some feudal-era father defending his daughter's chastity. This was all in the eyes, of course. The rest of the face stayed perfectly composed.”

Humor Dialogue City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Duel

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.”

Morning Description City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Waking Up

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.”

Kids Description City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.”

Relationships City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Mistreated

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Humor New York Los Angeles West Coast East Coast City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: 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.”

Body Anxious Awkward Embarrassed City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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?”

Therapy City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?”

Relationships Breakup City On Fire Garth Risk

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

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

Humor City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Allen Ginsberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?”

Time City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

New York City Batman City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg The Great Gatsby Gotham Jay Gatsby Allusions

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“It was as if the birds were caught in the repetition of some primal trauma, stuck between what they had and what they wanted.”

Stuck City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.”

Life Death Mortality City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Inescapable Unavoidable

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Ghost Melancholy Dissociation City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Parallel Universe Alternate Universe Removed

Book:City on Fire

Source: 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?”

Identity Past And Present City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.”

Artists Rare City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn't even met.”

Interconnectedness City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.”

Fairy Tales Interconnectedness Snow White Sleeping Beauty City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Converging

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Interconnectedness City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.”

Writing Infinite City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?”

Certainty These Days City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Soul Dream Relationship Couple Relief Reassurance City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Otp Mercer And William

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Shame City City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Flee

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

History Paranoia City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg Incidental

Book:City on Fire

Source: 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?”

Mistakes Breakup Irrevocable City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg What Ifs Alternate Universe What Could Have Been Burned Bridges Unfixable

Book:City on Fire

Source: 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.”

Hurt Mental Health Simile City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg In Your Head

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

“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.”

Darkness Perspective Memory Mask City On Fire Garth Risk Hallberg

Book:City on Fire

Source: City on Fire

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