129 Quotes by Tom Perrotta

When things don’t go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work.

Was it possible that they’d crossed without realizing it, each one rounding the corner of the aisle the other one had just vacated at exactly the same time?

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, “I don’t get to dictate this.”

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness after another?

It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

She was about to laugh at the selfishness of her reaction, but she was distracted by the cool evening air when she stepped outside, the dusky blue of the sky, and the freshly paved street in front of her, its blackness bisected by a bright yellow line, a world so inexplicably beautiful that she forgot what she was thinking about and just stood still for a moment, breathing it all in.

Maybe that’s what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

He made me think of all the books I hadn’t read, and all the ones I’d read but hadn’t fully understood.