And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?

— Garth Risk Hallberg

And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me?

— Garth Risk Hallberg

As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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?

— Garth Risk Hallberg

But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

But what if time worked the other way around? What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonio films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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.

— Garth Risk Hallberg