Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes - Page 2

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
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
Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
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
William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-
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
Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.
Garth Risk Hallberg
It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.
Garth Risk Hallberg
And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?
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
There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
Garth Risk Hallberg
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?
Garth Risk Hallberg
And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?
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
There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
Garth Risk Hallberg
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?
Garth Risk Hallberg
As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.
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
One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?
Garth Risk Hallberg