In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's going to sit down and listen to the entire 'Essential Billy Joel.'

— Garth Risk Hallberg

It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you'll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its force field of sadness.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it. . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him forever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?

— Garth Risk Hallberg