“Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. 'There's no one I'd rather get stuck in a… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Incidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley,… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing,… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Sitting in an armchair under yellow lamplight in front of a black window in an apartment whose only other light was the… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Maybe the siren was was a fire truck? Mercer couldn't see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. Bernard of the metaphysical,… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“I don't have anything against therapy, by the way; it's great for other people. It's just that, personally, I see the enterprise… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“There were two options—call the foul or don't—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“He's moving with such purpose that William is scared he might just speed right off the rooftop, like the roadrunner from the… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Pulaski had never been one for the overwrought plot; any entanglement he could imagine between these two lines of evidence was willful… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Amid them and amid the obdurate angels and the wildflowers pushing up through the earth, Richard could again be one among many.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“But what if time worked the other way around? What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Mercer looked around. There was no way anyone could hear. But the walls could, and the earth, and the ghosts of horses,… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“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… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
