“ A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. 'There's no one I'd rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,' William said. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. 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 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, 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… Garth Risk Hallberg
