“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 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“It was as if the birds were caught in the repetition of some primal trauma, stuck between what they had and what… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“But porca miseria , the things night can do to time. In place of hardwired sequence, it's more like everything all mixed up.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“You remember that saying, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' There's something awful about that saying.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“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… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are… — 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
“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
“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
“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.” — Garth Risk Hallberg 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 Copy Share Image
“And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?” — 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
“As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?” — 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
“As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you… — 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
“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
“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
“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 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 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
“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 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
