“ And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die? 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 forcefield of… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each othe… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ I respect Billy Joel, but I'm not a guy who's gonna sit down and listen to the entire 'Essential Billy Joel.' 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
“ Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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 S… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that's his name, my ex—and both of… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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
“ Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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
“ 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
“ As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer. Garth Risk Hallberg
