Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

Non sai mai quando sarà l'ultima volta in cui vedi tuo padre o baci tua moglie o giochi con il tuo fratellino, ma c'è sempre un'ultima volta. Se riuscissimo a ricordare ogni ultima volta, non smetteremmo mai di crucciarci.

Dad didn't believe in God, but he was a lifelong member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.

Carly and I lost our virginity there in the backseat of my dad's Pontiac on a cold January night, with the snow falling like a curtain over the fogged-up car windows and George Michael singing "Careless Whisper" on the car stereo. To this day, the opening bars of the sax solo instantly take me back to that night. Say what you will about car sex, but thirty million horny teenagers can't be wrong.

I'm sorry." I know it's the universal default, but the problem is, one's first knee-jerk response when someone says "I'm sorry" is to say "It's okay." We are programmed from kindergarten, from the first time the inevitable snot-nosed kid knocks over our blocks, to forgive. And it's not okay, it's as far from okay as it can really get, but there you are, tricked by a sociolinguistic tic into affirming that it is.

I am the star in my own Shakespearean farce, never managing to sleep with one woman without wanting the other. The gods of sex and irony are playing hockey, and I am their unwitting puck.

She's pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes.

I wait for him to say more, but he seems stuck, which I completely understand. Brad is confiding in me, and I am suddenly terrified at the prospect of such intimacy even though I know it's a good thing, a path to better relations. I think we both feel like impostors, posing as the kind of brothers who speak to each other about meaningful things.

If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty . . . shit.

And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we're all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping, and fucking as much as possible before something bigger comes along and devours us.

if I believed in God I would offer up a quick little prayer, and say, God, you have fucked with me enough, and I'm giving you this chance right here to begin making amends, but I don't so I can't, and all there is to do is sit nervously and wait for the moment to end.

So his actual death itself was less of an event than a final sad detail.

We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality. We were going to be different.

Where there once was the purest kind of love, there is now a snake pit of fury and resentment and a new dark and twisted love that hurts more than all the rest of it put together.

I want to materialize before that smug little shit like the Ghost of Christmas Past and scare the matrimonial impulse right out of him.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

In the rearview mirror I could see the front of the house, the bottom corners of the living room picture window, the line where the stone foundation gave way to staggered red bricks. My entire life, the sum total of my existence, was contained behind that wall, and it seemed to me that I should be able to step out of the car, walk through the front door, and simply reclaim it.

There was no one to call, no friends who weren't also connected to Jen. I thought about calling my mother, but my father was in a coma and she had enough to deal with. *My life was in a free fall, and there was nowhere to turn. A cold sense of desolation lodged itself somewhere in the base of my throat, and suddenly I was no longer enraged or devastated, but terrified of the immense, throbbing loneliness that was only now closing like a vise on my internal organs.*

We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa.

The book was something of a national phenomenon and turned my mother into something of a celebrity expert on parenting. Predictably, my siblings and I were screwed up beyond all repair.

I'd always assumed that the people who lived in those fancy houses in the suburbs were financially better off than I was, and only once I'd joined them did I come to understand that it's all just a much more sophisticated and elaborate way of being broke.

A little over a year." You'd have thought, after the events of the last half hour, that I was beyond shocking by now. A little over a year wasn't a fling, a random sexual indiscretion. It was a relationship. It meant that Jen and Wade had an anniversary.

You see the people you love the way they are in your head, but every once in a while you accidentally catch a glimpse of them in real time

What the bloody motherfucking hell happens now? I checked my watch, the white-gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Jen had bought me for my thirtieth birthday. I'd been fine with the Citizen I wore, missed it, actually, when she gave me this bulky piece of showy hardware, but things like that were important to Jen. She'd taken to the suburbs like an actress getting into character for a new role, and she was always determined that we both look the part.

The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don't believe for a minute he doesn't know it.