“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
“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
“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
“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 Copy Share Image
“Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?” — 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
“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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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
“Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.” — 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
“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
“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
“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
“And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.” — Garth Risk Hallberg 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 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
“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
“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 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
“He’d wanted it to be about losing, about the things we’re born into loving and then lose.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.” — Garth Risk Hallberg 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. And then… — 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
“But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known… — Garth Risk Hallberg 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 you don't… — 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
“And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to… — 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 to this… — 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 on a… — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
