Jonathan Tropper > Quotes

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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.
The tears threaten to return, so I willfully banish all thoughts from my head and take a few more deep breaths. I'm suddenly dizzy from the panic attack I've just suffered, and I close my eyes, resting my head against the warm leather of my steering wheel. 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, The Book of Joe

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, How to Talk to a Widower

“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.”
― Jonathan Tropper, How to Talk to a Widower

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, Everything Changes

“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

“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, The Book of Joe

“We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

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

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“The sky is fucking with me. It's one of those militantly perfect spring days, the kind that seems to be trying just a little too hard, the kind you want to smack in the face, and the sky is bluer than it has any right to be, really, an obnoxious, overbearing blue that implies that staying home is a crime against humanity. Like I've got anywhere to go. The neighborhood is alive with gardeners mowing lawns and trimming hedges, the mechanized hiss of twirling sprinklers and for those just joining us, it's a beautiful day and Hailey is dead and I have nothing to do, nowhere to be.”
― Jonathan Tropper, How to Talk to a Widower

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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

“I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe”
― Jonathan Tropper

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“You swear you’ll never become your parents. You listen to edgy music, you dress young and hip, you have sex standing up and on kitchen tables, you say “fuck” and “shit” a lot, and then one day, without warning, their words emerge from your mouth like long-dormant sleeper agents suddenly activated. You’re still young enough to hear these words through the ears of the teenager sitting beside you, and you realize how pitiful and ultimately futile your efforts will be, a few measly sandbags against the tidal wave of genetic destiny.”
― Jonathan Tropper, How to Talk to a Widower

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“I'm not the same person I was. I'm fucked up." I give her a sideways glance. "I am," she says. "You haven't even scratched the surface."

"I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another.”
― Jonathan Tropper, The Book of Joe

“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, Plan B

“I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she'll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She'll throw temper tantrums, she'll need speech therapy, she'll grow breasts and have pimples, she'll fight with her parents, she'll worry about her weight, she'll put out, she'll have her heart broken, she'll be happy, she'll be lonely, she'll be complicated, she'll be confused, she'll be depressed, she'll fall in love and get married, and she'll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beautiful.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“...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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, Plan B

“Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“Do I really look so pathetic to all of you? Like I couldn't possibly meet someone on my own? Half the people in the world are women. Odds are that at least a few of them would be willing to go out with me.'
'Damn right,' Phillip chimes in. 'And it's not like he's been celibate since he moved out. He had sex last night, FYI.'
'Don't help me, Phillip.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

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

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, How to Talk to a Widower

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it’s time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis.”
― Jonathan Tropper

“Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roods of cars, generating atmostphere. What they don't show you is how the legs of your suit caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you're supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you're mentally tracking the trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don't convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splater with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“Jen shakes her head sadly and I can see her lower lip trembling, the tear that's starting to form in the corner of her eye. I can't touch her, kiss her, love her, or even, as it turns out, have a conversation that doesn't degenerate into angry reincriminations in the first three minutes. But I can still make her sad, and for now, I'll have to be satisfied with that. And it would be easier, so much easier, if she didn't insist on being so goddamned beautiful, so gym-toned and honey-haired and wide-eyed and vulnerable. Because even now, even after all that she's done to me, there's still something in her eyes that makes me want to shelter her at any cost, even though I know it's really me who needs the protection. It would be so much easier if she wasn't Jen. But she is, and where there was once the purest kind of love, there is now a snake pit of fury and resentment and a new dark and twisted love that hurts more than all the rest put together.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

“Man muss die Originalität des eigenen Lebens infrage stellen wenn es sich mit den Zeilen eines Rocksongs perfekt umschreiben lässt.”
― Jonathan Tropper, The Book of Joe

“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, This Is Where I Leave You

“We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don't understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn't. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bima, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can't begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It's got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can't help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last "amen" has been said, I'm sorry that' it's over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family's wet eyes tells me that I'm not the only one who feels that way. I don't feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that's more than I expected.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

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

“Wir sehen Menschen, die wir lieben, meist nur so, wie wir sie im Kopf haben. Hin und wieder aber erhaschen wir zufällig einen Blick darauf, wie sie in Wirklichkeit aussehen, und in den Sekundenbruchteilen, die unser Gehirn braucht, um sich auf die neue Realität einzustellen, kommen kleine Dinge in uns vom Weg ab und wirbeln schreiend irgendeinen Abhang hinunter.”
― Jonathan Tropper, How to Talk to a Widower