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.”

“At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik.”

“No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?”

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

“When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least.”

“I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.”