209 Quotes by Garth Risk Hallberg

Aren’t you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn’t still dream of a world other than this one?

He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things you don’t want to get through.

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.

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

All these threads, like the ley-lines he’d read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes you weren’t yet the person you needed to be to do the work you needed to do.