82 Quotes About City-on-fire

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.

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.

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.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

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.