Jonathan Tropper Quotes

Childhood feels so permanent, ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

It's hard to know where to start. 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. All you can ever really know is that it's wrapped around you, sometimes a little tighter than you'd like.
But clearly there have been some mistakes. Bad ones. You can tell that just by looking at him. ~ Jonathan Tropper

The life you build feels like the entire world, and when it's suddenly gone, the world doesn't make sense for a while. Or, in his case, ever again. ~ Jonathan Tropper

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it's time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Bllod will separate, if need be, but its call is primordial, and it won't be refused. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

It wasn't that she didn't love me, I knew that she did, and that actually made it worse. If someone leaves you because they don't love you, it's a tough break, but as they say, life's a bitch, get a helmet. But if someone loves you and leaves you anyway, you enter a whole new realm of self-doubt and recrimination, what psychologists call the what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-me syndrome. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

And if you want to know where all the good guys are, we're standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Everyone wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late. Jonathan Tropper, from The Book of Joe ~ Madelon Phillips

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Oh, people will come, Ray," Phillip intones, doing his best James Earl Jones. "People will most definitely come. ~ Jonathan Tropper

The self-help books and websites haven't come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

It's a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you're avoiding your progenitor's defective character. I'm not like him becomes your mantra, ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

He has always had a dangerous tendency to embrace blind optimism in the face of hard facts. ~ Jonathan Tropper

If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it's because that's how we were raised. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed - although he doesn't know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you're simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back. ~ Jonathan Tropper

You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I'm heading into the trenches alone. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky. ~ Jonathan Tropper

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Everybody dies alone. That's a fact. Some more alone than others. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I'll tell you the same thing I told your father. We make mistakes. They don't make us. If they did, we'd all be royally fucked, especially a coupe of assholes like us."
I grin at his last remark, and finally find some words to say, even though I'm not sure I possess the conciliatory feelings to match my town. "You could learn a lot from an asshole."
Dugan smiles at that, and it's the first time I've ever seen him do it. "I guess so. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Forgiveness is a comfort, but it doesn't bring back what you lost ~ Jonathan Tropper

The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I'd been forced into a movie, and there was nothing to do but follow the script. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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 ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

You never know when you're going to die, but maybe something in you does, some cellular consciousness that's aware of the cosmic countdown and starts making plans, because on the last night of her life, Hailey surprised me by wearing a blood red dress, cut low and tight in all the right spots. It was almost as if she knew what was coming, knew that this would be our last night together, and she was determined to keep herself from fading too quickly into the washed-out colors of memory. I ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I haven't seen her in a while, haven't returned her calls or stopped thinking about her. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

The future just isn't what it used to be ~ Jonathan Tropper

Attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at bay with facials, compression undergarments, and aggressively fashionable skirts bought off the rack at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They run on treadmills, these women, work out with personal trainers and play tennis at the club, but still their hips widen, their legs thicken, their breasts sag. Genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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... ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

You get married to get an ally against your family. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way." Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. "That's a pretty dire outlook on life," she says. "What's the point in working to be happy if you're going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it's time to pay the bill? ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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 ~ Jonathan Tropper

He'd continue to cry passionately, long after he'd forgotten why he was crying to begin with. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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

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 ... ~ Jonathan Tropper

Sometimes you walk past a pretty girl on the street there's something beyond beauty in her face, something warm and smart and inviting, and in the three seconds you have to look at her, you actually fall in love, and in those moments, you can actually know the taste of her kiss, the feel of her skin against yours, the sound of her laugh, how she'll look at you and make you whole. And then she's gone, and in the five seconds afterwards, you mourn her loss with more sadness than you'll ever admit to. ~ Jonathan Tropper

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