Top 120 Jonathan Tropper Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing.”

— Jonathan Tropper

52. “A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”

— Jonathan Tropper

53. “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

54. “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

55. “I feel a dark wave of regret for the kind of person I turned out to be.”

— Jonathan Tropper

56. “The whole purpose of screenwriting is to convey everything through action and dialogue and not explanation and exposition. To me, there are movies where voiceover works really well because it does something more than exposition; it actually becomes a tonal element of the movie.”

— Jonathan Tropper

57. “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

58. “You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don’t want to let her go, so you don’t move on.”

— Jonathan Tropper

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

— Jonathan Tropper

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Until you found your way out of the woods, it was reassuring to find other people lost in them with you.”

— Jonathan Tropper

63. “The tears come to my eyes so fast, there’s just no way to stop them.”

— Jonathan Tropper

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

— Jonathan Tropper

65. “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.”

— Jonathan Tropper

66. “None of us makes eye contact. We have pretty much had it with each other. We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure. – Judd Foxman.”

— Jonathan Tropper

67. “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.”

— Jonathan Tropper

68. “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

69. “He has always had a dangerous tendency to embrace blind optimism in the face of hard facts.”

— Jonathan Tropper

70. “Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It’s really crafting this whole piece from nothing.”

— Jonathan Tropper

71. “Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them.”

— Jonathan Tropper

72. “Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.”

— Jonathan Tropper

73. “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

74. “A lot can go wrong in twelve hours.”

— Jonathan Tropper

75. “What would you like to do today?” he says. She gives him a funny look. “What are my options?” “Sky’s the limit.” She considers it for a moment. “Brunch?” “I say the sky’s the limit and all you can come up with is brunch?” “I’m just not sure we live under the same sky.”

— Jonathan Tropper

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

— Jonathan Tropper

77. “People brush past us on the street in endless waves, leaving somewhere, headed somewhere else, laughing, smoking, speaking into cell phones, completely oblivious to the holocaust of an entire world casually imploding in their midst.”

— Jonathan Tropper

78. “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

79. “What do you mean by that, Paul?” We are ending our sentences with names, which is the equivalent of fighters circling, looking to throw the first punch.”

— Jonathan Tropper

80. “The music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there.”

— Jonathan Tropper

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

— Jonathan Tropper

82. “If so, how do we feel about it?” “We are numb.”

— Jonathan Tropper

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

— Jonathan Tropper

84. “You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.”

— Jonathan Tropper

85. “It’s rare for someone to say something to you, just a few words, really, and actually make you see yourself from a completely different vantage point.”

— Jonathan Tropper

86. “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

87. “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.”

— Jonathan Tropper

88. “I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.”

— Jonathan Tropper

89. “One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.”

— Jonathan Tropper

90. “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.”

— Jonathan Tropper

91. “In my family, we don’t so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.”

— Jonathan Tropper

92. “Over the course of a fifty-year marriage, one bad year isn’t very significant. Your marriage might still be there to be saved. But you’ll never know if you keep indulging your hate and anger like the world owes you reparations.”

— Jonathan Tropper

93. “And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.”

— Jonathan Tropper

94. “The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don’t believe for a minute he doesn’t know it. With his long white beard and stout build, he has to know the effect of wearing a red and white anorak and how inappropriate the whole getup looks in the Mount Zion Cemetery.”

— Jonathan Tropper

95. “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

96. “This is how it ends, he thinks. Strangely, he is not panicked, just a little bit sad. He tells himself to pay attention. If this is death it will only come once, and he doesn’t want to miss anything. Like he did when he was alive.”

— Jonathan Tropper

97. “Don’t you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?”

— Jonathan Tropper

98. “Being an official divorce brought late-night channel-surfing up to a staggering new level of depressing. I just wanted to belong to someone already.”

— Jonathan Tropper

99. “You’re thinking about one woman while trying to reach another, and despite this apparent abundance of women, you feel lonely and desolate as hell, and, almost unconsciously, you drive to the house of a third, and the third woman is your mother.”

— Jonathan Tropper

100. “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.”

— Jonathan Tropper