City on Fire Quotes

“Sometimes you weren’t yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do.”
― 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

“this is what happens to people when they spend their entire life inside books + never come out: real life starts to grate by comparison.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“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, City on Fire

“You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“But I guess what I would want to leave each of you with finally -- tender some Evidence of, against a life's worth of signs to the contrary -- comes down simply to this: You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“I don't think you can really change anything unless you're willing to say yes.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“The Lonliest Man in the World, she said, only has room in his heart for one person, and if he can't have that person, he locks himself away. He tells himself no one could possibly love him, but really, it's that he refuses to love anyone else.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone else is framing the choices for you.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

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

“No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the grand finale until it’s over. And at that point, wherever one is, one won’t ever really have been anywhere else.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never been enough to contain. Family, work, romance, church, municipality, history, happenstance ... He wanted to follow the soul far enough out along these lines of relationship to discover that there was no fixed point where one person ended and another began.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“There was a period just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody got.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“What would Walt Whitman do?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, 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.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Love, as Mercer had heretofore understood it, involved huge gravitational fields of duty and disapproval bearing down on the parties involved, turning even small-talk into a ragged struggle for breath.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“When you were young, you had the resources to rebuild after each crater fate blasted in your life. Beyond a certain age, though, you could only wall off the damage and leave it there.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“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, City on Fire

“Aren’t you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn’t still dream of a world other than this one?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things you don't want to get through.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he's doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own . . . he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is 'remember' even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn't stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn't.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“On one hand, you couldn’t count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, 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.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“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, City on Fire

“watch William’s beloved sport, but to him televised football was no more interesting, or even narratively intelligible, than a flea circus, so he got up and went to the kitchenette to do the other stations of the Yuletide cross.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire