“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were. 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. 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
“ 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
“ 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… 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
