Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

You're just the sperm donor, Norm," he says, heading for the door. "That's all you were ever good for. Fucking sperm.

I'll just get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you're not yet a complete person.

A problem is something to solve. If there's no solution, it's not a problem, so stop treating it like one.

Cole is in what Wendy refers to as his E.T. stage, wherein he waddles around the house like E.T., exploring and trashing everything within reach, making strange little noises as he goes.

Until you have money, you think it's the answer to everything, and only once you have it do you realize that it's just a whole new set of questions, the only difference being that now you have to keep them to yourself, because no one's going to sympathize.

You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them

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

It's actually somewhat common for people facing death to reach out to God," Boner says, in the exact same self-important, didactic tone he employed as a kid when explaining to us what a blow job was.

You get married to have an ally against your family.

At some point, loneliness becomes 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 your 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 yesterday, 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

He wakes up and thinks, I'm alive. This simple fact fills him with a sense of accomplishment. He didn't die in his sleep.

He starts to panic at the prospect, and then gets angry at how unfair it is to have to be scared of anything after you've already died. Isn't that supposed to be one of the perks? N more fear and worrying, no more lugging around all the shit that got tangled up in your mortal coil over the years? That's kind of what he's been counting on.

Dad is bent over me, fixing my wooden leg with a socket wrench.

Maybe we're supposed to save each other.

There are some people out there who don't wait for what comes next. They decide what should come next and they go make it happen.

apology. "It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

Tracy turns to face me. "You got married right out of college. You're terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you." "Empower me to do what?" "To be the father you want to be, the man you want to be. And then you'll be ready to make a plan.

Then I'm telling it wrong." "Bad?" "Yes. Divorce shouldn't be friendly. It just makes everything that much more confusing

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.

You swear you'll never become your parents. You listen to edgy music, you dress young and hip, you have sex standing up and on kitchen tables, you say "fuck" and "shit" a lot, and then one day, without warning, their words emerge from your mouth like long-dormant sleeper agents suddenly activated.

For the record, there are other visitors, a handful of pleasant-faced, middle-aged women, long-standing friends of my mother, 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

back (thank god for office accessorizing, the last playground of the reluctant adult).

Now we had to work to make ourselves fit into each other's lives, to maintain our relevance to each other. In college our collective friendship had been at the center of our lives, and now the centrifugal force of time had pushed it out to the perimeter, where it was in danger of spinning off the circle altogether. Thirty . . . shit.

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.