“Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.” — Garth Risk Hallberg Copy Share Image
“You're hung up on something that's never going to love you back.” — 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
“Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.” — 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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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 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
“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
“Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like being on a commuter train… — 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan… — 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
“For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three… — 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
“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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
