Jonathan Tropper Quotes

Everyone always 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

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

~ Jonathan Tropper

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

~ Jonathan Tropper

We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don't understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn't. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bima, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can't begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It's got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can't help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last amen has been said, I'm sorry that' it's over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family's wet eyes tells me that I'm not the only one who feels that way. I don't feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that's more than I expected.

~ Jonathan Tropper

If at first you don't succeed, lower you expectations

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, 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.

~ Jonathan Tropper

Because the thing of it is, no matter how much you enjoy sex, there’s something jolting and strangely disturbing about witnessing the sex of others. Nature has taken great pains to lay out the fundamentals of copulation so that it’s impossible to get a particularly good view of the sex you’re having. Because when you get right down to it, sex is a messy, gritty, often grotesque business to behold: the hairs; the abraded, dimpled flesh; the wide-open orifices; the exposed, glistening organs. And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we’re all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping and fucking as much as possible before our something bigger comes along and devours us.

~ 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

I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing

~ Jonathan Tropper

I wasted a lot of time being angry, time I can't get back. And now I see you, so angry about what happened to your marriage, and I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

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.

~ Jonathan Tropper

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ 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

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

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.

~ Jonathan Tropper

At some point, loneliness become less a condition than a habit. In time, you stop looking at your phone wondering why you can't think of anyone to call, stop getting you hair cut, stop working out, stop thinking that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. Because tomorrow is today, and today is yerterday, and yesterday beat the shit out of you and brought you to your knees. The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

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

~ Jonathan Tropper

And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, beingangry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoningyourself without thinking about it.

~ 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

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

I love Hailey and what we have works. Shes's beautiful, she's smart, she's a great mother, and she's heads above what I ever thought I could see in myself.

~ Jonathan Tropper

...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.

~ Jonathan Tropper

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.

~ 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