Quotes by Garth Risk Hallberg

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

“But 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...”

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

“You couldnt trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.”

“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.”

“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,...”

“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 ho...”

“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...”

“What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there werent actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secretto be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

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

“America isnt that far from totalitarianism.”

“Failure is so much more interesting.”

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