Jonathan Tropper Quotes

You realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

When you're younger you just take it as a given that things will fall into place on their own. Relationships, family, careers, the whole deal. They might not come as you picture them, but they come in some form. You just never figure that they might not come at all. And then you hit thirty and ... shit! You suddenly realize that they're not necessarily coming and you panic.

As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage of being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.

Here's the thing. I don't think you're in love with her, not all the way. If you were, I think you would seem more certain about it. More jazzed. You wouldn't hug me the way we hug, and say the things you say to me. You definitely wouldn't have kissed me the other day the way you did. I'm not saying you're in love with me. I'm just saying that whatever this thing is you feel toward me, this thing we're both too scared to mention, I don't think it could exist if you were head over heels in live with Hope. And if that's the case, if youre not head over heels in love with her, you shouldnt marry her.
P.268

If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty ... shit.

Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.

Young people with terminal illnesses develop a whimsical, slightly sarcastic sense of humor about it to put everyone else at ease and to serve as shining examples of grace in the face of colossally fucked-up events.

What would you like to do today?" he says. She gives him a funny look. "What are my options?" "Sky's the limit." She considers it for a moment. "Brunch?" "I say the sky's the limit and all you can come up with is brunch?" "I'm just not sure we live under the same sky.

I would have done the same thing I did. I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn't you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there's no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I know better ... The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn't you.

The thing about people who work in finance is that they consider their job infinitely more important than anything or anyone, and so it's perfectly legitimate to tell everyone else to fuck off because they have a conference call with Dubai.

She'll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she'll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy.

But moving from conversation to violence is just as hard as moving from flirting to kissing. There's that leap you have to take, to shed your inhibitions and expose your naked impulses.

Healing is a deeply private process and, honestly, you're not welcome to be a part of it. But you will have given me a short furlough from the dark, sorry prison of my mind, and that gift, precious in its own right, is really the best you can hope to offer.

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The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.

It's amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.

You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have.

There is a sense of violation in learning that, unbeknownst to me, my mind has maintained such a strong connection with the town, as if my brain's been sneaking around behind my back.

Everything I touch turns to shit, he thinks, not with self-pity, but with an almost scientific fascination at the truth of it.

I'm really not a fan of voiceovers; I think they become a crutch.

You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.

And nothing can be resolved until each of you has come to appreciate the other's position

The whole purpose of screenwriting is to convey everything through action and dialogue and not explanation and exposition. To me, there are movies where voiceover works really well because it does something more than exposition; it actually becomes a tonal element of the movie.

Being an official divorce brought late-night channel-surfing up to a staggering new level of depressing. I just wanted to belong to someone already.

I could report the rest of the conversation, but it's just more of the same, two people whose love became toxic, lobbing regret grenades at each other.

You lost your wife, Douglas. My heartbreaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don't even get to mourn.

If anything, love is just a starting point. Then life intrudes, along with the personal baggage you've spent years packing, and things get royally and irrevocably fucked up. You can get bitter or you can keep trying. Most people do some of each.

In my defense, I was young and there was an open bar.

You OK?" she says, raising her eyebrows. "You're teetering."
He nods and steadies himself against the wall. "Aren't we all," he says.

But that's why you pay for insurance, right? If you never file a claim, then they've beaten you.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

The tears come to my eyes so fast, there's just no way to stop them.

The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.

I'm at my desk before nine, and I go all day. I'm not necessarily productive all day, but really, who is?

Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don't share thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them.

But that's one of the questions I've learned not to ask, because I'll get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you're not yet a complete person.

I loved her for the way she embraced the unknown, how she opened herself up to every experience. When I was with her, she opened me up, too, stirred my passion and heightened my every sensation. Which was great, until she left me and all my heightened senses to deal with the heartache of losing her.

We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, about finances and fiancees and soon-to-be ex wives, about the sex we're not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams.

The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don't believe for a minute he doesn't know it. With his long white beard and stout build, he has to know the effect of wearing a red and white anorak and how inappropriate the whole getup looks in the Mount Zion Cemetery.

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.

I look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.

And even as she holds on to him, like she's drowning, she can feel the familiar anger returning, like an old song that you've heard so many times it's not even a song anymore, just a wasted pathway in your brain that you can never reclaim.

People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald's for making them fat pigs.

Someone should sing, Silver thinks, and then someone does-a low, somewhat hoarse man's voice singing "Amazing Grace" quietly but with great sincerity. Ruben's eyes grow wide, and almost in the same instant that it occurs to Silver that "Amazing Grace" is not sung at Jewish funerals, he recognizes the singing voice as his own.
But Mrs. Zeiring is looking at him, not with anger or surprise, but a strange half-smile, and he decides that the only thing worse than spontaneously breaking into a Christian hymn at a Jewish funeral while dressed for a wedding would be to not finish it. So he does ...

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was holding a large birthday cake.

Due to some mental hiccup I can't explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket.

But someday I'll fall in love again, right? I'll start over with someone, and maybe we'll buy a big old house with all this new money I have, and we'll have kids, and I'll be a professional writer, maybe even write some books. I'll have this whole great life, and it will be thanks to Hailey dying in a plane crash. And I don't know exactly at what point it will happen, but the time will come when I'll have crossed this line where maybe I wouldn't go back to save her, because I'll know that if it weren't for her dying, I wouldn't have this family I love, and this life I'm living. And the thought of that, of becoming the person who wouldn't go back to save her...

But we are not going to talk about that right now, because to talk about it I'll have to think about it, and I've thought it to death over the last year. There are parts of my brain that are still tirelessly thinking about it, about her, an entire research and development department wholly dedicated to finding new ways to grieve and mourn and feel sorry for myself. And let me tell you, they're good at what they do down there. So I'll leave them to it.

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire.

The cobbler's children go barefoot,

It's funny, or tragic, really, how an ordinary act like helping someone with their homework could be the inadvertent trigger for almost a decade of silent suffering.

But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery.

She's pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes.

Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roods of cars, generating atmostphere. What they don't show you is how the legs of your suit caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you're supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you're mentally tracking the trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don't convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splater with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars.

Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model," he says, and he would know. "It will never feel as good as it looks.

I lost something after Hailey died. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's the device that stops ypu from telling the truth when people ask you how you're doing, that vital valve that keeps you deeper, truer emotions under lock and key. I don't know exactly when I lost it, or how to get it back, but for now when it comes to tact, civility, and discretion, I'm an accident waiting to happen, over and over again.
Socially, that makes me something of a liability.

Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they're never really gone.

She holds on to a rung of the ladder while I tread water a foot or so in front of her. After a few moments, my eyes have adjusted to that I can look into hers. I flash back to Horry and Wendy, looking at each other in this exact spot a few hours ago, this haunted pool that seems to pull dead and buried love to its surface.

Dad didn't believe in God, but he was a lifelong member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can. So his actual death itself was less an event than a final sad detail.

Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they're being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube - guys skulking in their T-shirts and cargo shorts, girls in low-slung jeans and flip-flops, pimples and breasts and tattoos and lipstick and legs and bra straps, and cigarettes; a colorful, sexy melange. I feel old and tired and I just want to be them again, want to be young and stupid, filled with angst and attitude and unbridled lust. Can I have a do-over, please? I swear to God I'll make a real go of it this time.

Don't you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?

And there's a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display.

As always, the first instant he sees her, he can feel his heart shut down, the way you do in those first moment after impact, or, he supposes, when you're drowning. Love or panic. The two have always been fairly indistinguishable to him.

When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.

Anger you have locked up in you, and that's healthy. I just think you could be a little more judicious

We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.

I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.

Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.

Childhood feels so permanent,

This is the age," she explained to me once as we walked home from school, "when we're the purest forms of ourselves we'll ever be. We haven't been complicated by everything yet. I want to keep a clear record of who I am, so that down the road I'll be able to see who I was. Maybe I can avoid losing myself completely."

She sighed, biting her lip pensively. "Things happen," she said. "Small things and large things, and they just keep changing you, little by little, until there's no trace of who you used to be. If I get lost, this journal will be like a record of who I was, a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

When did being right become worthless, and being at fault irrelevant?

This is just your time, son, that's all. Your time to hurt and bleed and tear apart your notion of what makes you who you are. Life knocks us all on our ass at some point. And then we get back up, and we make some changes, because that's what men do. We adapt. And when we're done adapting, we're better equipped to survive.

Nobody wants to rock their own life. But, on the other hand, when your life does get rocked, it affords you a certain level of emotional honesty. It liberates you to be who you really are.

Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn't hear it in time.

Whatever the opposite of a plan is, that's what I've got.

This is how it ends, he thinks. Strangely, he is not panicked, just a little bit sad. He tells himself to pay attention. If this is death it will only come once, and he doesn't want to miss anything. Like he did when he was alive.

Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.

You get married to get an ally against your family.

I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?"
"Not really," he said. "No."
"Then why do we come here?"
He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.
And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

At some point, loneliness becomes less a condition than a habit.

You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don't want to let her go, so you don't move on.

Did i say something wrong?"
"Well, in your defense, there is no right thing to say.

I work for the Spandler Corporation. We are a three-hundred-million-dollar business, with offices in twelve states. We have over five hundred employees. We are known throughout the country as a leader in the industry. Our customers rely heavily on us. We produce nothing. We sell nothing. We buy nothing. If we didn't exist, Kafka would have to invent us.

All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues-with metal studs and rings.

The point is, people become possessive of their grief, almost proud of it. They want to believe it's like no one else's. But it is. It's exactly like everybody else's. Grief is like a shark. It's been around forever, and in that time there's been just about no evolution. You know why?" "Why?" "Because it's perfect just the way it is.

And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.

Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.

The last time I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it's understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture.

Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.

I totally remember what it felt like to be so full ... Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you're bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon ... You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then ... it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe

She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.

If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack in the ass.

It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

Being gay is like taking a crash course in human nature," he says. "Your first real glimpse at the dirty underbelly of routine social interaction. A lesser person, " he offers with a wry grin, "Might well become one bitter fuck.

An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday.

The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It's a brutal business, being a woman. Wendy sucks in her gut and crosses her legs, pointing her toes like a ballerina in a last-ditch effort to coax her calf muscle out of hiding. She has our mother's legs, sheathed in thick, smooth skin that defies definition.

It was one of those playful arguments that we would carry with us unresolved into old age.