Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

maybe what you consider fearlessness is actually just an expert level of loneliness.

You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I'm heading into the trenches alone.

Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's.

Why'd you come to me?" "Really?" "Yeah." "I care less about letting you down.

No one under eighty moves to Florida. Isn't that like a federal statute or something?

Penny's honesty has always been like nudity in an action movie: gratuitous, but no less welcome for it.

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, and in those split seconds, as your brain scrambles to adjust to the new reality, small things inside you swerve off the road and drive over cliffs, spinning and screaming all the way down.

You didn't invent grief. My shrink once told me that." "Really? Your shrink told you about me?

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up. "Look

All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues-with metal studs and rings.

He gives her a look. She gives it right back. We couldn't have really had something good, he thinks, regret filling his lungs like water. "Sometimes I think that too," Casey says, and he realizes that, once again, he's spoken out loud. "But I try not to, because then I get angry at you.

That's the problem with college kids. I blame Hollywood for skewing their perspective. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet-cute, happily-ever-after is a foregone conclusion.

To have nothing when you're twenty is cool, it's expected, but to have nothing when you're halfway to seventy, softening and widening on a daily basis, is something altogether different. It's like setting out to drive cross-country without any gas money.

Around age twenty-six, in an effort to stave off thirty, I began embracing the new alternative angst bands, like Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, et cetera, but at thirty, little of that remains. At thirty, you're back to the comforting sounds you grew up with. You have enough genuine angst of your own, you don't need it in your music.

You OK?" she says, raising her eyebrows. "You're teetering." He nods and steadies himself against the wall. "Aren't we all," he says.

It's amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.

Grief can be catered just like anything else.

Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.

You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

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

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

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. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

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.