Top 60 Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

2. “And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

4. “Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom – not when someone else is framing the choices for you.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

5. “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

6. “You’re hung up on something that’s never going to love you back.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

7. “It seemed impossible that he’d chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

8. “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.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

9. “If you throw a banana at a wall, there’s a small possibility that it will pass through the wall.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

10. “These are your peak earning years, my friend. You’ve got kids to think about. And soon enough, alimony.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

12. “Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

13. “Steering between the Scylla of too much and the Charybdis of not-enough, he’d worked hard to project a retiring asexuality. As far as his coworkers knew, he lived with only his books for company. Still, he relished her name in his mouth. “Regan.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

14. “The four food groups of bachelorhood: Frozen, Cold Cuts, Breakfast Cereal, and Takeout.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

19. “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

20. “And I start to feel once more that the lines that have boxed in my life – between past and present, outside and in – are dissolving. That I may yet myself be delivered.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

21. “Really, though, he’d snuck back into his skull with tiny wrenches to make the kinds of adjustments that would allow him to continue living this way, with a boyfriend who would walk out on you on Christmas Day.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

22. “It’s like Charlie’s dreamed everything he lived through here.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

23. “Have you seen The Man Who Fell to Earth?” Charlie’s face was hot, his asthma tightening his throat. “I realize that maybe sounds like a metaphor, but you listen to David Bowie, he’s thinking about what people will face in the future.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

24. “You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

25. “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

26. “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

27. “It occurs to me that what adulthood actually is is the problem of what one wants to constrain oneself to.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

28. “IN NEW YORK, you can get anything delivered. Such, anyway, is the principle I’m operating on.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

29. “On one hand, you couldn’t count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

30. “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

31. “How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

32. “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

33. “All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

34. “I don’t think you can really change anything unless you’re willing to say yes.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

35. “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

36. “Someone else shoved a pencil in your hand and aimed you in the direction of a burning building somewhere and told you not to come back without a quote from the fire marshall, kid, and that was it: you were a reporter.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

37. “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

38. “Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

40. “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

41. “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

42. “Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

43. “Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they’re not around other people.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

44. “There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Maybe we’re just fundamentally destined for unhappiness.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

49. “She’d believed in the promises of the ’60s, after all, even if she’d participated only indirectly. Hadn’t they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they’d made at twenty?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

50. “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