“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
