Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

Don't you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?

Rest stops have always made him strangely happy. He couldn't say why. Just the idea of everyone on their way somewhere, united by wanderlust, no one belonging more than anyone else.

In real life, you don't get to choose what you forget.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is depth.

Sometimes, commitment is a matter of will. 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.

At some point, loneliness become less a condition than a habit. In time, you stop looking at your phone wondering why you can't think of anyone to call, stop getting you hair cut, stop working out, stop thinking that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. Because tomorrow is today, and today is yerterday, and yesterday beat the shit out of you and brought you to your knees. The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.

A lot can go wrong in twelve hours.

And beneath the chaos of the moment, Denise becomes aware of a painful truth about herself: she is never as deeply in love with a man as she is in the moment he leaves her.

I haven't seen her in a while, haven't returned her calls or stopped thinking about her.

You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them for being there on those scary nights, for giving you a place to run to where your nightmares couldn't follow, the one place where you could descend finally into slumber knowing, at least for the time being, that you were completely safe.

In my family, we don't so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.

It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are.

She holds on to a rung of the ladder while I tread water a foot or so in front of her. After a few moments, my eyes have adjusted to that I can look into hers. I flash back to Horry and Wendy, looking at each other in this exact spot a few hours ago, this haunted pool that seems to pull dead and buried love to its surface.

Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model. It will never feel as good as it looks.

We don't share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.

Good sex requires many different things, but in most cases, efficiency isn't one of them. - Judd Foxman

None of us makes eye contact. We have pretty much had it with each other. We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure. - Judd Foxman

I don't have a career, I don't have a family, and I don't know what to do next. I've been so determined to escape anything permanent, and now I just feel like I'm nowhere. And what if that's the permanent thing by default?

I lost something after Hailey died. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's the device that stops ypu from telling the truth when people ask you how you're doing, that vital valve that keeps you deeper, truer emotions under lock and key. I don't know exactly when I lost it, or how to get it back, but for now when it comes to tact, civility, and discretion, I'm an accident waiting to happen, over and over again. Socially, that makes me something of a liability.

If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

The tears come to my eyes so fast, there's just no way to stop them.

The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It's a brutal business, being a woman.

He has always had a dangerous tendency to embrace blind optimism in the face of hard facts.

If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it's because that's how we were raised.