Garth Risk Hallberg

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

Failure is so much more interesting.

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.

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?

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.

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.

You couldn__ trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday.

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 misery__ misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.

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

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.

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

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.

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 swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history.

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

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.

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