01UndatedI couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren't an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
02UndatedOne day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
03UndatedAs if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
04UndatedBut what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
05UndatedAnd didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
06UndatedBut 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 when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
07UndatedThere is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
08UndatedSome people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
10UndatedEverything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
11UndatedThree’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
12UndatedAnd as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
13UndatedWilliam, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
14UndatedNo amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
15UndatedReading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
16UndatedFor paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
17UndatedThe sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
20UndatedAs ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
21UndatedAnd she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
22UndatedIncidental, all of it, of course, but this was what this city bestowed that novels couldn't: not what you needed in order to live, but what made the living worth doing in the first place.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
23UndatedIn the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
24UndatedYou couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.Garth Risk Hallberg / quote ↗
