Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

A funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

America isn’t that far from totalitarianism.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg