209 Quotes by Garth Risk Hallberg

It occurs to me that what adulthood actually is is the problem of what one wants to constrain oneself to.

Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores.

I couldn’t understand; cheating was the one thing I’d told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren’t an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself.

She’d believed in the promises of the ’60s, after all, even if she’d participated only indirectly. Hadn’t they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they’d made at twenty?

All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Really, though, he’d snuck back into his skull with tiny wrenches to make the kinds of adjustments that would allow him to continue living this way, with a boyfriend who would walk out on you on Christmas Day.

It’s like Charlie’s dreamed everything he lived through here.

Even before the letter he’d been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.

Have you seen The Man Who Fell to Earth?” Charlie’s face was hot, his asthma tightening his throat. “I realize that maybe sounds like a metaphor, but you listen to David Bowie, he’s thinking about what people will face in the future.