The collection / 79 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you'll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its forcefield of sadness.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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02Undated

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 cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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03Undated

No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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04Undated

It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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05Undated

Failure is so much more interesting.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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06Undated

It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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07Undated

You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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08Undated

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

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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09Undated

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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10Undated

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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11Undated

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

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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12Undated

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

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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13Undated

Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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14Undated

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 how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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15Undated

So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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16Undated

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 as well not be there.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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17Undated

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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18Undated

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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19Undated

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 / quote

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20Undated

What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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21Undated

And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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22Undated

When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. 'There's no one I'd rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,' William said.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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23Undated

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 be studying.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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24Undated

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.

Garth Risk Hallberg / quote

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