Jonathan Tropper famous quotes

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Eye #Glimpse #Routine

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. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Life #Wise #Looks

I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Ideas #Universe

You're terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Inspiration #Worry #Empowering

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#True Love #Pain #Answers

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Past #Long #People

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Mistake #Thinking #People

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Growing Up #Growing #Circumstances

I blame Hollywood for skewing perspectives. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily ever-after is a forgone conclusion.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Cute #Perspective #Hollywood

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Sibling #Funny Family #People

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Baby #Loneliness #Parks

I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Pain #Bullets #Shots

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

#Disappear #Instant #Feels

I want to explain everything to him, show him that it’s really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Sound #Want #Remember

I would have done the same thing I did. I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn't you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there's no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I know better....The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn't you.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Love You #Thinking #Loving Someone

Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Song #Common Sense #Brain

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Dad #Prayer #Believe

At this point in my life, I'm not looking for any happy endings. I'm just looking to get things started.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Happy Endings

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Thinking #Self #Hands

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Mother #Dog #Kids

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Thinking #Numbers #World

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Brother #Growing Up #Three

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Real #Dying #Happy Day

Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Empowering

I loved her for the way she embraced the unknown, how she opened herself up to every experience. When I was with her, she opened me up, too, stirred my passion and heightened my every sensation. Which was great, until she left me and all my heightened senses to deal with the heartache of losing her.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Passion #Heartache #Way

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Awkward #Advantage #Inarticulate

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Different #Our Family

You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Brother #Father #Kissing

And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Falling In Love #Color #Mind

You lost your wife, Douglas. My heartbreaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don’t even get to mourn.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Husband #Wife #Doe

But the muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Naps #Afternoon #Sometimes

Sometimes you walk past a pretty girl on the street there's something beyond beauty in her face, something warm and smart and inviting, and in the three seconds you have to look at her, you actually fall in love, and in those moments, you can actually know the taste of her kiss, the feel of her skin against yours, the sound of her laugh, how she'll look at you and make you whole. And then she's gone, and in the five seconds afterwards, you mourn her loss with more sadness than you'll ever admit to.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Girl #Falling In Love #Smart

She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so ***** beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Beautiful #Smart #Kind

I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Girl #Jobs #Kissing

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

#Looks #Lasts #Feels

...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Falling In Love #Color #Mind

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

#Couple #Toxic #Scared

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

#Thinking #Smoking #Habit

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Father #Childhood #One Day

Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they're being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube - guys skulking in their T-shirts and cargo shorts, girls in low-slung jeans and flip-flops, pimples and breasts and tattoos and lipstick and legs and bra straps, and cigarettes; a colorful, sexy melange. I feel old and tired and I just want to be them again, want to be young and stupid, filled with angst and attitude and unbridled lust. Can I have a do-over, please? I swear to God I'll make a real go of it this time.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Tattoo #Girl #Sexy

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#People #Parent #Impossible

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#People #Perfect #Firsts

The future just isn't what it used to be
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Used

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

#Pity #Fart

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

#Thinking #Able

It's amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#World #Sometimes

Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Loneliness #Play #Symphony

If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack in the ass.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Conflict #Ass #Grunt

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, 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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Lonely #Knowing #Feelings

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Years #Skins #Trying

I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing
-- Jonathan Tropper

#May

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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Lonely #Believe #Years

We're all clichés, all following scripts that have been written and played out long before we landed the role.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Long #Roles #Scripts

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

#Love #Hate #People

There are some people out there who don't wait for what come next. They decide what should come next and they go and make it happen.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#People #Waiting #Next

Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Fate #Packs

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

#Realizing

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

#Giving #Comfort #Lost

↑ top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an ***** means I probably am not, because a real ***** 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.
-- Jonathan Tropper

#Real #Mean #Thinking