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City on Fire QUOTES

City on Fire QUOTES

1 " 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 , City on Fire

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

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

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

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

4 " 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 , City on Fire

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

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

6 " 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 , City on Fire

7 " There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

8 " Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

9 " It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

10 " Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

11 " Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

12 " 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 , City on Fire

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

16 " 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 , City on Fire

17 " 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 , City on Fire

18 " William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause. "

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

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

― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire

20 " 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