209 Quotes by Garth Risk Hallberg

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.

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

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, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

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.

And she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.

Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.

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—that's his name, my ex—and 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?

One day, he and William had been speeding toward each other; the next, careening away. But why?

Some people think the real them is whoever they are when they're not around other people.