“William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?” — Garth Risk Hallberg Chance Copy Share Image
“When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?” — Garth Risk Hallberg Breakups Copy Share Image
“Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?” — Garth Risk Hallberg Certainty 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 Art 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 Children 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 City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things… — Garth Risk Hallberg Candle Copy Share Image
“You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that… — Garth Risk Hallberg Anxious Copy Share Image
“In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun.… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“The cushions of my friend's couch were some kind of rubberized velour, the windows were uncurtained, and at five a.m. the birds… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“For paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“I couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said,… — Garth Risk Hallberg Cheating Copy Share Image
“No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New… — Garth Risk Hallberg City Copy Share Image
“Daddy just repeated the word, internship . As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward… — Garth Risk Hallberg Beauty 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 City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them… — Garth Risk Hallberg Change Copy Share Image
“He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the type-writer, trying to get back to the book he'd come… — Garth Risk Hallberg Anton-chekhov Copy Share Image
“Some young man has wronged you, hasn't he?' From a person who renounced on principle the possibility of transcendental morality, she thought,… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people,… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two… — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.” — Garth Risk Hallberg City-on-fire Copy Share Image
“Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Change Copy Share Image
“Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Alone Copy Share Image