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.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

There were two options—call the foul or don't—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here at this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he'd been doing for months now with every last person he loved.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

The sky was low and broody, but from here, near the treeline, you could see the forest rolling down into the valley, the lake tucked away like a pocket mirror.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Three’s all you need to change the world. Look at the Bolsheviks, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Was she Minh They, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.

— Garth Risk Hallberg

What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material.

— Garth Risk Hallberg