Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

I feel a dark wave of regret for the kind of person I turned out to be.

If you're eating an ice cream cone, it's just very hard to believe that things have gone completely to shit. That there isn't still hope.

You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have.

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

I've been treating my life as this pit stop, just kind of regrouping before I move on. But it's been seven years, and I never moved on. I haven't done anything. I just...stopped.

Never marry a beautiful woman. Worship them if you must, go to bed with them if you can—by all means, everyone should have carnal knowledge of physical perfection at least once in their life—but when it comes to marriage, it's a losing proposition. You will never stop feeling like a gatecrasher at your own party. Instead of feeling lucky, you will spend your life on edge, waiting for the other stiletto to fall and puncture your heart like a bullet.

Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.

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

To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it's too late is to become divinely fucked up.

And ice-cream cones,' she says. 'What is it with you and ice-cream cones?' He licks around the edge of his cone as he considers the question. 'I guess no one ever eats an ice-cream cone at a funeral, or a fire. The Red Cross doesn't drop ice-cream cones into third-world countries. If you're eating an ice-cream cone, it's just very hard to believe that things have gone completely to shit. That there isn't still hope.

top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

Do I really look so pathetic to all of you? Like I couldn't possibly meet someone on my own? Half the people in the world are women. Odds are that at least a few of them would be willing to go out with me.' 'Damn right,' Phillip chimes in. 'And it's not like he's been celibate since he moved out. He had sex last night, FYI.' 'Don't help me, Phillip.

As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage of being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.

coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.

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.

THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It's the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.

Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood.

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.

she'll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she'll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy.

At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.

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

If there's a perk to having such a fucked up father, it's that he's in no position to judge.

Time doesn't heal as much as it buries things in the undergrowth of your brain, where they lie in wait to ambush you when you least expect it.

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire.