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101 " this is what happens to people when they spend their entire life inside books + never come out: real life starts to grate by comparison. "
― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire
102 " I don't think you can really change anything unless you're willing to say yes. "
103 " But I guess what I would want to leave each of you with finally -- tender some Evidence of, against a life's worth of signs to the contrary -- comes down simply to this: You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone. "
104 " The Lonliest Man in the World, she said, only has room in his heart for one person, and if he can't have that person, he locks himself away. He tells himself no one could possibly love him, but really, it's that he refuses to love anyone else. "
105 " Choice isn’t the same thing as freedom—not when someone else is framing the choices for you. "
106 " What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never been enough to contain. Family, work, romance, church, municipality, history, happenstance ... He wanted to follow the soul far enough out along these lines of relationship to discover that there was no fixed point where one person ended and another began. "
107 " No past and no future. Save for the fireworker himself, no one ever knows the grand finale is the grand finale until it’s over. And at that point, wherever one is, one won’t ever really have been anywhere else. "
108 " There was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself. "
109 " Aren’t you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn’t still dream of a world other than this one? "
110 " Love, as Mercer had heretofore understood it, involved huge gravitational fields of duty and disapproval bearing down on the parties involved, turning even small-talk into a ragged struggle for breath. "
111 " Apparently, though, fear was merely the mask fascination wore to hide itself from itself. "
112 " There was a period just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody got. "
113 " When you were young, you had the resources to rebuild after each crater fate blasted in your life. Beyond a certain age, though, you could only wall off the damage and leave it there. "
114 " Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores. "
115 " Who among us—if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks—is ready even now to give up hope? BOOK "
116 " On one hand, you couldn’t count on anything; on the other, on any given day, change was vanishingly unlikely. "
117 " THE THING WAS, William had a kind of genius for not noticing what he didn’t want to notice. "
118 " pusillanimous "
119 " All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree. "
120 " It seemed impossible that he’d chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained. "