43 quotes found
“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.”
“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.”
“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...”
“As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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...”
“Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.”
“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.”
