{"quotes":[{"text":"Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn't reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","comfort","crying","garth-risk-hallberg"],"id":883,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","college","garth-risk-hallberg","humor"],"id":1100,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"An actual artist, living right under her nose.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["artist","city-on-fire","garth-risk-hallberg"],"id":10017,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"The second this interminable wait ended, it would all start to fall away into the past, to become unreal.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","garth-risk-hallberg","waiting"],"id":22598,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"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.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","description","garth-risk-hallberg","school","simile"],"id":23279,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"For paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","garth-risk-hallberg","history","incidental","paranoia"],"id":27209,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","garth-risk-hallberg","passage-of-time","time"],"id":48393,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","garth-risk-hallberg","insight","reading","simile"],"id":54699,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"There were two options—call the foul or don't—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he'd been doing for months now with every last person he loved.","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","conflict","confrontation","garth-risk-hallberg"],"id":69002,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"},{"text":"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?","author":"Garth Risk Hallberg","tags":["city-on-fire","garth-risk-hallberg","identity","past-and-present"],"id":71088,"author_id":"Garth+Risk+Hallberg"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":54,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}