Garth Risk Hallberg

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death.

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer__hat's his name, my ex__nd both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?

Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.

America isn__ that far from totalitarianism.

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

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, secret__o be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.

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

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

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.

Who didn__ exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

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.

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.

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.

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__he present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table__hich you, specifically, is the real one?