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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

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

— Garth Risk Hallberg

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's come from might as well not be there.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and. . . Time only runs the one way.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Works--is ready even now to give up hope?

— Garth Risk Hallberg