Garth Risk Hallberg

“What would Walt Whitman do?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“An actual artist, living right under her nose.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“How to break this to him. How to let a thing be broken.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“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

“He's moving with such purpose that William is scared he might just speed right off the rooftop, like the roadrunner from the…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“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

“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

“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

“Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“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

“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

“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

“Daddy just repeated the word, internship . As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I don't have anything against therapy, by the way; it's great for other people. It's just that, personally, I see the enterprise…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Maybe the siren was was a fire truck? Mercer couldn't see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. Bernard of the metaphysical,…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg