Quotes by 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, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.”

“Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.”

“Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.”

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

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

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

“Incidental, 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.”

“Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.”

“Threes all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.”

“And she learned that you couldnt stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.”

“And 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 i...”

“In 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 miserya misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishab...”

“William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-”

“I 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 hav...”

“One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?”

“As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.”

“No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.”

“Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.”

“For 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 s...”

“But 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?”