236 Quotes by Jonathan Tropper

Nothing doesn’t happen all at once. It starts slow, so slow that you don’t even notice it. And then, when you do, you banish it to the back of your mind in a hail of rationalizations and resolutions. You get busy, you bury yourself in your meaningless work, and for a while you keep the consciousness of Nothing at bay. But then something happens and you’re forced to face the fact that Nothing is happening to you right now, and has been for some time.

And there’s a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display.

Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they’re never really gone.

I’m really not a fan of voiceovers; I think they become a crutch.

It’s sort of an organic process when you’re adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

The point is, people become possessive of their grief, almost proud of it. They want to believe it’s like no one else’s. But it is. It’s exactly like everybody else’s. Grief is like a shark. It’s been around forever, and in that time there’s been just about no evolution. You know why?” “Why?” “Because it’s perfect just the way it is.

Maybe yelling back is a kind of marital diplomacy.

If they’re letting her cry anyway, I don’t really see the point of the baby monitor, but that’s one of those questions I’ve learned not to ask, because I’ll just get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you’re not yet a complete person.

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.