Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

You could fill an airlift to Africa with all the food generated by one dead Jew.

but that's one of the questions I've learned not to ask, because I'll get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you're not yet a complete person.

It's hard to imagine your heart simply stopping, but at the same time, it's hard to believe that it didn't give up years ago.

He was right here and nowhere to be found.

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn't know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you're simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.

But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery.

As always, the first instant he sees her, he can feel his heart shut down, the way you do in those first moment after impact, or, he supposes, when you're drowning. Love or panic. The two have always been fairly indistinguishable to him.

We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.

There's nothing more depressing than waking up in your shoes.

There's no way to know what's pissing him off right now. In my family, we don't so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.

Even betting against myself, I could always find a way to lose.

At some point, loneliness becomes less a condition than a habit.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was holding a large birthday cake.

I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully 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. And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model," he says, and he would know. "It will never feel as good as it looks.

I'd been forced into a movie, and there was nothing to do but follow the script.

At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent.

But we are not going to talk about that right now, because to talk about it I'll have to think about it, and I've thought it to death over the last year. There are parts of my brain that are still tirelessly thinking about it, about her, an entire research and development department wholly dedicated to finding new ways to grieve and mourn and feel sorry for myself. And let me tell you, they're good at what they do down there. So I'll leave them to it.

I'll tell you the same thing I told your father. We make mistakes. They don't make us. If they did, we'd all be royally fucked, especially a coupe of assholes like us." I grin at his last remark, and finally find some words to say, even though I'm not sure I possess the conciliatory feelings to match my town. "You could learn a lot from an asshole." Dugan smiles at that, and it's the first time I've ever seen him do it. "I guess so.

In my defense, I was young and there was an open bar.

The thing about people who work in finance is that they consider their job infinitely more important than anything or anyone, and so it's perfectly legitimate to tell everyone else to fuck off because they have a conference call with Dubai.

The last time I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it's understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture.

If so, how do we feel about it?" "We are numb.

It took him four months for him to die, three more than the oncologists had predicted. "Your dad's a fighter," they would say when we visited, which was a crock, because he'd already been soundly beaten. If he was at all aware, he had to be pissed at how long it was taking him to do something as simple as die. Dad doesn't believe in God, but he was a life-long member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.