209 Quotes by Garth Risk Hallberg

In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.

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.

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

Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself.

But deadpan cool has long since thinned into a manner. Its reflexive irony is now more or less the house style of late capitalism.

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.

America isn’t that far from totalitarianism.

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.

Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.