Jean Thompson Quotes

The evening is nearly over. Before long it will be last call and Good Night, Ladies. Only a few more minutes and exhilaration will start its inevitable leakage. Even the best, dizziest times have that moment of deflation when people realize that everything has already happened. But for now all possibilities are intact.

She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later.
Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this.

Maybe getting to know a child wasn't entirely unlike meditation. You kept going at it from all different angles, and once in a while something clicked.

We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?

He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no.

I am a tourist of the emotions, visiting only the most well-worn spots. It is romantic, that is, a distortion, to imagine whole lives from the barest observation.

Did poverty in itself lead to moral failings, such as crime? Was "goodness" something that could be objectified and measured? Did society benefit directly from individual virtue, and therefore have incentive to promote it? Did our concepts of goodness have their foundations in religious and spiritual practice? What about the notion that money was the root of all evil, and those monks and nuns who felt it necessary to deny themselves material wealth?

Nobody knows what to do when there's a tragedy. Nobody practices for it.

The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences and bawdy women.
Rolled with laughter. Parent's fear, college student's desire.

They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?

She didn't look like Louise. She didn't look much like anybody except herself.

Her parents didn't get it. Life was different now. The future, her future and that of everyone else her age, had blown up in slow motion. She lived the way she did because greed had sucked the juice out of the world and it was no longer possible to get one of those humble but promising jobs that led, with hard work and perseverance, to something that might be considered a career. Instead you competed with ambitious, underpaid people on the Indian subcontinent for the sucky customer service jobs, or you might choose to go the tech route and work as a coding slave, or sign noncompete and binding arbitration agreements with some major corporation that still required human bodies to do their dirty work for them.

You know, your family's exactly like I imagined them. Exactly like you." "What's that supposed to mean?" "You're like the blackbirds. The blondbirds." "Very funny." "They're very nice. You always talk like they're Norwegian hillbillies or something.

His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.

He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple.

It was still very wet under the trees. A careless tug at a branch might flip cold rainbow-edged drops down your back. And the sky was gray as concrete. But they enjoyed the silence, the soft sucking ground matted with last year's needles.