“ And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die? 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
“ 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
“ College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and… Garth Risk Hallberg
“ The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ 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. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare. Garth Risk Hallberg
“ He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to… Garth Risk Hallberg
