Quotes from Tom Perrotta

Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.

We're agnostics, she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends. We don't know if there's a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don't.

She felt strong and blissfully empty gliding through the crisp November air, enjoying the intermittent warmth of the sun as it filtered down through the overhanging trees, which were mostly stripped of their foliage. It was that trashy, post-Halloween part of the fall, yellow and orange leaves littering the ground

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

It's a matter of dignity," the Chief explained. "At a certain point, that's all you have left.

Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that the best days had come and gone without her even realizing it.

Because that's what privilege is-the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you're a good person.

I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it's not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he'd fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you'll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.

No, it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You'll know it's true, but you won't really believe it.

And of course they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that's what privilege is—the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you're a good person.

When your words are futile, you're better off keeping them to yourself

Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over Spongebob's body...During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and Spongebob's body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?

Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory, Gregory said, It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.

The thing was to wear a bathing suit and look good in it, to somehow make yourself worthy of the scenario you were volunteering for.

No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day.

And right now he was feeling the weight of all those losses, and the weight of the years that were behind him, and the weight of the ones that were still ahead, however many there might be – three or four, twenty or thirty, maybe more.

Eve still marveled on a daily basis at the speed with which her own life had changed. A year ago, she'd been lost and flailing, and now she was found. She wanted to call it a miracle, but it was simpler than that, and a lot more ordinary; she'd met a kind and decent man who loved her.

Except for a small strip of shin that poked out from between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants, his legs were purely theoretical.

It was nothing really, just a passing shadow. And Eve had lived long enough to know that it was foolish to worry about a shadow, everybody had one, it was just the shape your body made when the sun came out.

Something that had possibly caused the distance between us, but might also bring us back together.

She was the kind of woman who always surprised you with the realization that she was just as lovely as you remembered, though it hardly seemed possible in her absence.

What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head.

It was like traveling back in time, meeting the person you used to be, and recognizing her as a friend.

we read fiction to satisfy a more basic need—to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten.