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21 " In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's. "
― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire
22 " You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday. "
23 " 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. "
24 " 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? "
25 " It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion. "
26 " Failure is so much more interesting. "
27 " It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too. "
28 " You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives. "
29 " When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. "
30 " What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong. "
31 " Was she Minh Thuy, 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. "
32 " Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling. "
33 " Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were. "
34 " 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? "
35 " 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. "
36 " 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. "
37 " 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. "
38 " Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories? "
39 " That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see. "
40 " 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. "