Top 70 Tom Perrotta Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.”

— Tom Perrotta

2. “They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.”

— Tom Perrotta

3. “Once you’d broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.”

— Tom Perrotta

4. “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.”

— Tom Perrotta

5. “Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?”

— Tom Perrotta

6. “I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it’s not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he’d fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you’ll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.”

— Tom Perrotta

7. “If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.”

— Tom Perrotta

8. “Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.”

— Tom Perrotta

9. “To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.”

— Tom Perrotta

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

— Tom Perrotta

11. “Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.”

— Tom Perrotta

12. “We don’t smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith.”

— Tom Perrotta

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

— Tom Perrotta

14. “After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.”

— Tom Perrotta

15. “Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.”

— Tom Perrotta

16. “It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.”

— Tom Perrotta

17. “The thing was to wear a bathing suit and look good in it, to somehow make yourself worthy of the scenario you were volunteering for.”

— Tom Perrotta

18. “I read ‘The Great Gatsby’ in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.”

— Tom Perrotta

19. “Nothing beats novel writing because it’s complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.”

— Tom Perrotta

20. “My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant – we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.”

— Tom Perrotta

21. “All she knew was that she’d inflicted pain on someone she cared about, and that always cost you something, even if you were just doing your job. It left you feeling dirty and mean, exposed to the laws of karma.”

— Tom Perrotta

22. “Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over Spongebob’s body... During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and Spongebob’s body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?”

— Tom Perrotta

23. “I’ve been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.”

— Tom Perrotta

24. “I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.”

— Tom Perrotta

25. “Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.”

— Tom Perrotta

26. “I got PTSD from high school.”

— Tom Perrotta

27. “All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.”

— Tom Perrotta

28. “I think I’m fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it’s impossible to ignore.”

— Tom Perrotta

29. “It was nothing really, just a passing shadow. And Eve had lived long enough to know that it was foolish to worry about a shadow, everybody had one, it was just the shape your body made when the sun came out.”

— Tom Perrotta

30. “I don’t really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I’m writing. The two go together – I’m interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.”

— Tom Perrotta

31. “As for writing about temptation, there’s no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.”

— Tom Perrotta

32. “I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.”

— Tom Perrotta

33. “Something that had possibly caused the distance between us, but might also bring us back together.”

— Tom Perrotta

34. “It felt good, the whole family together on a sunny morning in a wholesome environment. If it hadn’t been for the warshiping God part, he would have happily attended church on a regular basis.”

— Tom Perrotta

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

— Tom Perrotta

36. “And right now he was feeling the weight of all those losses, and the weight of the years that were behind him, and the weight of the ones that were still ahead, however many there might be – three or four, twenty or thirty, maybe more.”

— Tom Perrotta

37. “I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It’s pretty wild. I hadn’t heard of it until I was in college.”

— Tom Perrotta

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

— Tom Perrotta

39. “I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.”

— Tom Perrotta

40. “No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day.”

— Tom Perrotta

41. “I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.”

— Tom Perrotta

42. “I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called ‘Pariah.’ The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was ‘Pariah.’ It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.”

— Tom Perrotta

43. “I’m not sure that it’s possible to write a novel about people who don’t transgress or stumble, people who don’t surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it’s not possible for me to write that sort of novel.”

— Tom Perrotta

44. “It was like traveling back in time, meeting the person you used to be, and recognizing her as a friend.”

— Tom Perrotta

45. “She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who’d sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn’t possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.”

— Tom Perrotta

46. “Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid’s day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can’t catch up with it, not even if you try.”

— Tom Perrotta

47. “She knew exactly what was weighing him down: that helpless feeling that you were wasting your precious youth and it was your own damn fault.”

— Tom Perrotta

48. “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.”

— Tom Perrotta

49. “It’s like the human race has been programmed for misery.”

— Tom Perrotta

50. “I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.”

— Tom Perrotta