Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.

I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.

I may not be old but I'm too old to have this much nothing

We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.

Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.

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.

Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.

It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.

We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

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

I'm living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.

Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.

I'm not the same person I was. I'm fucked up." I give her a sideways glance. "I am," she says. "You haven't even scratched the surface." "I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another.

you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

I wasted a lot of time being angry, time I can't get back. And now I see you, so angry about what happened to your marriage, and I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.

When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.

We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.

I have a handful of leather jackets, and I love them all. I think most men my age do, and it can be traced back to the Fonz and Danny Zuko.

You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don't want to let her go, so you don't move on.

Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.