Quotes from Jonathan Tropper

It was one of those playful arguments that we would carry with us unresolved into old age.

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.

Later, I'll replay this conversation and be somewhat unsure of what exactly transpired. Is it my forgiveness or his own we've just been negotiating? But at this moment, I felt vaguely satisfied that a rapprochement of sorts has been reached, and a long-raging battle has been ended. I don't like him any more than I did before, but maybe I hate him a little less, and I guess that's something.

Jen was in turmoil; she was grappling with self-esteem issues and a failed attempt at anorexia. I was in the right place at the right time, and the gods were finally ready to cut me some slack.

Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way." Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. "That's a pretty dire outlook on life," she says. "What's the point in working to be happy if you're going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it's time to pay the bill?

I smile. "You were always so good at not covering up." Penny's smile is sad and a little off. "It's the antidepressants. They've obliterated whatever filters I have left.

You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.

I think about making a list of all the things I need to tell people before it's too late.

We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, about finances and fiancees and soon-to-be ex wives, about the sex we're not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams.

This is just your time, son, that's all. Your time to hurt and bleed and tear apart your notion of what makes you who you are. Life knocks us all on our ass at some point. And then we get back up, and we make some changes, because that's what men do. We adapt. And when we're done adapting, we're better equipped to survive.

But moving from conversation to violence is just as hard as moving from flirting to kissing. There's that leap you have to take, to shed your inhibitions and expose your naked impulses.

As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it.

And someday soon, I'll rest in peace. But till that day does come, I'll rest in pieces.

The self-help books and websites haven't come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy.

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

It occurs to hi that what he has failed to impart through wisdom, he may well have imparted through stupidity.

Healing is a deeply private process and, honestly, you're not welcome to be a part of it. But you will have given me a short furlough from the dark, sorry prison of my mind, and that gift, precious in its own right, is really the best you can hope to offer.

And nothing can be resolved until each of you has come to appreciate the other's position

Nobody wants to rock their own life. But, on the other hand, when your life does get rocked, it affords you a certain level of emotional honesty. It liberates you to be who you really are.

Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.

What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it's for the last time?

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.

Don't you ever worry about the future?" I asked. Jack shrugged. "This is the future," he said.

Dad didn't believe in God, but he was a lifelong member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can. So his actual death itself was less an event than a final sad detail.