Quotes from Tom Perrotta

When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher ' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.

From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.

It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

That's why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.

To this day, she's still sad. Because there's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I'm just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn't hurt me at all.

Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.

Things change all the time - abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer — that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.

I've matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

She took care of evyone with the same no-nonsense air of friendliness and good cheer that made her seem so paradoxically wholesome, as if she were convinced that being a slut and being a really nice person were just two things that naturally went together.

Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occured.

He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.

I'm only human, she told herself. There's not enough room in my heart for everyone.