Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

one of the lounge chairs. Serena

Her ironic inflection fills me with the familiar impulse to simultaneously kiss her deeply and strangle her until she turns blue. Neither is an option at this juncture, so I have to content myself with slamming the trunk harder than necessary.

It's okay, Douglas." "It's not okay." "It's life, that's all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.

It's funny, or tragic, really, how an ordinary act like helping someone with their homework could be the inadvertent trigger for almost a decade of silent suffering.

Perfection is plastic, cold, and unyielding. Real beauty is a current that has to be grounded, and it's these little defects that do it. You need context, a reference point. Her scarred upper lip is the hook, the default nucleus from which everything else radiates.

Elmsbrook is the perfect town for a serial killer, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Young people with terminal illnesses develop a whimsical, slightly sarcastic sense of humor about it to put everyone else at ease and to serve as shining examples of grace in the face of colossally fucked-up events.

He shakes his head and grimaces. "I need to get my own place, like, yesterday." "So why don't you?" He taps his head. "Brain injury. There are things I can't do." "Like what?" "Like remembering what the fuck it is I can't do." He opens the passenger door and throws himself down in the seat.

if there is an afterlife, then nothing here mattered, and if there isn't an afterlife, nothing here mattered.

It occurs to me, just before I pass out, that maybe I was miserable before, but things were going too well for me to notice it.

I sift through the jumble of emotions she evokes in me, trying exactly to isolate what it is I feel for her, which is like untying a severely knotted rope, where all you end up with is more knots in a different configuration.

When you've been married to someone for a while, you occasionally share these brief psychic moments, and right at that instant I know what she's going to say just before she says it, even while I'm thinking that it can't possible be true.

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.

Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he'll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face and red eyes will seem entirely appropriate.

You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time.

You could tell he was a bad guy because he didn't have a tan

When I first met you …" "When I first met you I thought about asking you out." "So why didn't you?" "It's complicated." "People always say that, but it never really is." "That's probably true.

I used to fuck stuff up like that all the time. I didn't see the big deal.

I'm troubled by the notion that while I wasn't looking, I seem to have become an asshole.

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.

There is irony, and then there's my life.

I'll never fully understand the agenda of angry breast-feeders.

I stand between these two attractive people as something of an oddity, like the guy taking the light readings at a photo shoot, miraculously connected to both of them, conspicuously average; the man in the middle.

On the CAT scan, tumors bloomed like flowers against the charcoal desert of his duodenal lining. Into the lore of Dad's legendary stoicism would be added the fact that he spent a year treating metastatic stomach cancer with Tums.