“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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
“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 Copy Share Image
“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.” — 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
“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 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
