Quotes from Tom Perrotta

Some subjects mixed well with weed, but Chemistry wasn't one of them.

Doesn't settle for less than she deserves, or apologize unless it's absolutely necessary.

Kissing her just then felt perfectly normal and completely self-explanatory, the only possible course of action.

All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.

These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.

In the far corner of the yard, two squirrels raced up a tree trunk, their little feet scrabbling frantically on the bark. He couldn't tell if they were having a good time or trying to kill each other.

Actually, he hadn't just complained; she'd come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked him what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the book before it killed him.

On the first day of Human Sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date---not that she was going on a lot of dates these days---let alone to work.

the cause of what they called the "Sudden Departure" remained unknown

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness after another?

She had a slightly dizzying sense of being overtaken by time, the future becoming the present before she was ready.

fairness and gender rarely intersected.

Every night was a somber, adults-only slumber party - no giggles or whispers, just lots of coughing and farting and snoring and groaning, the sounds and smells of too many stressed-out of people packed into too small a place.

Doesn't matter where you live. You're always just kind of alone with your shit, you know?

As if adult males were completely self-sufficient beings, as if a penis and a five o'clock shadow were all they would ever need to get by.

just a dark shape against an even darker background.

It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work.

She was about to laugh at the selfishness of her reaction, but she was distracted by the cool evening air when she stepped outside, the dusky blue of the sky, and the freshly paved street in front of her, its blackness bisected by a bright yellow line, a world so inexplicably beautiful that she forgot what she was thinking about and just stood still for a moment, breathing it all in.

She wanted to read and think and reconnect with her collegiate self, which had been so much more open and fluid and hopeful than the versions that had succeeded it.

It was surprisingly crowded, a bunch of middle-aged people, mostly women, moving enthusiastically, if a bit awkwardly, to Prince's "Little Red Corvette," trying to find a way back to their younger, more limber selves.

And when Aaron called out for him just then, right on time, there was something beautiful about that, too, the way a little kid needed you for everything and wasn't afraid to say so.

She knew exactly what was weighing him down: that helpless feeling that you were wasting your precious youth and it was your own damn fault.

a regimen of hardship and humiliation that at least offered you the dignity of feeling like your existence bore some sort of relationship to reality, that you were no longer engaged in a game of make-believe that would consume the rest of your

I got PTSD from high school.