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181 " Their heroes were always straying from well-lit paths and into the woods. Or maybe it was a single wood: the dark place where the things they feared most dwelled. And so, he reassured himself, he had the advantage of knowing already how this had to end. He had stopped to admire a flower, had gotten waylaid in the shadows, but in no time at all he would be back on the path again renewed and rededicated. For was that not the point of the woods? "
― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire
182 " He’d wanted it to be about losing, about the things we’re born into loving and then lose. "
183 " The other kids sometimes teased Charlie for being a redheaded Jew, "
184 " It was possible, suddenly, to separate love from being beholden. "
185 " I don’t see the point of a Messiah who sends you to hell. "
186 " Here is what you want: your life stays just the same, while I twist myself around you like a vine. "
187 " And I start to feel once more that the lines that have boxed in my life – between past and present, outside and in – are dissolving. That I may yet myself be delivered. "
188 " privileging her "
189 " It was as if, Pulaski sometimes thought, the ’60s had tipped the entire country on end and shaken it like a box of cereal until all the flakes ended up in the East Village. "
190 " Love is everyone’s blind spot. Or love and fear. "
191 " The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.” Whatever pride Mercer had felt "
192 " corporatocracy "
193 " It was almost Christmas, and a Santa Claus in a vacant lot was offering to appear in pictures for five dollars. The trim on his suit was mangy, as if it had been dug out of a dumpster, yet young mothers queued ten deep on the sidewalk, holding the hands of kids waiting to get in. "
194 " 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 "
195 " For it was only with her that he’d ever felt that powerful powerlessness he knew was love. "
196 " third-world "
197 " Mercer didn’t know, but Lost Illusions was one of his personal favorites. Basically, a young poet from the provinces comes to Paris to make his fortune and, in the fullness of time, discovers that he’s been wrong about everything. All the people he takes for geniuses are idiots, and vice versa. "
198 " And she had 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. "
199 " In Shakespeare, tragedy was the flame struck from the clash of moral principles; here "
200 " Would anyone else ever find him attractive? Would he be able to trust them? Would he ever make love again, or even want to? And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die? (And "