Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Garth Risk Hallberg
Garth Risk Hallberg Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Garth Risk Hallberg on Wise Famous Quotes.
Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell.
When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you.
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.
The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's come from might as well not be there.
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.
For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.
Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.
The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.
I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go.
I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.
Amid them and amid the obdurate angels and the wildflowers pushing up through the earth, Richard could again be one among many.
That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.
And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.
I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to the degree that I ever was, a noticer.
It's a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.
Henry James would probably roll over in his grave if he knew he was in any way responsible for this book.
The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?'
There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.
William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-
Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.
I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.
On one hand, you couldn't count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely.
Keith was no Franciscan, and it seemed to him an act of narcissism to feed pigeons, who would if anything outlast us.
In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.
Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.
Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery,
You remember that saying, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' There's something awful about that saying.
The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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.
When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least.
Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.
Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.
As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.
This isn't Soviet Russia. This is America we're talking about. For God's sake, this is New York City.
He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted.
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.
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.
Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one?
this is what happens to people when they spend their entire life inside books + never come out: real life starts to grate by comparison.
Impingement, in other words, is all around, and this freedom business is much messier than it looks at first blush.
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.