Top 50 Tommy Wallach Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world is full of unknown mysteries and vague resolutions.”

— Tommy Wallach

2. “Do you think it is better to fail at something worthwhile, or succeed at something meaningless.”

— Tommy Wallach

3. “You didn’t win the game of life by losing the least. That would be one of those – what were they called again? – Pyrrhic victories. Real winning was having the most to lose, even if it meant you might lose it all. Even though it meant you would lose it all, sooner or later.”

— Tommy Wallach

4. “Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he’d always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds.”

— Tommy Wallach

5. “They’d been learning about the phrase ‘pyrrhic victory’, which came from Roman times and meant that you’d won something, like a battle, but in order to win, you had to lose so much that you really hadn’t won at all.”

— Tommy Wallach

6. “People don’t like getting older, but they do like changing. Staying the same is a kind of death.”

— Tommy Wallach

7. “Beauty always made a target of its possessor. Every other human quality was hidden easily enough – intelligence, talent, selfishness, even madness – but beauty would not be concealed.”

— Tommy Wallach

8. “She looked up toward the sky, toward the implacable sparkle of good old Ardor, and saw that the two of them – she and the asteroid – were caught up I a battle of wills. In that moment, she stopped being afraid of it, even dared it to come, because she knew thre was mo way it could crave death as much as she craved life.”

— Tommy Wallach

9. “She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them.”

— Tommy Wallach

10. “Love is the exception to the law of diminishing returns.”

— Tommy Wallach

11. “She was miserable because she kept hoping things would change. If she could eradicate the hope, she could eradicate the sadness.”

— Tommy Wallach

12. “That was how you could be lucky without being lucky. That was how you could be a winner and still lose.”

— Tommy Wallach

13. “Alana – still dressed as a pirate- chambers over the counter like that evil Japanese ghost in the Ring, knocking over the child-size popcorn of some little kid, who starts to cry. The pink-pigtailed girl knows something crazy is going on, but she doesn’t yet understand it has anything to do with her. Not until Alana has grabbed Tyler by his black button-down shirt and pushed him hard into the Icee machine, which begins to stream cherry-red Icee onto the counter.”

— Tommy Wallach

14. “Just another little piece of utterly irrelevant history, aspiring to permanence, doomed to oblivion.”

— Tommy Wallach

15. “I’m nobody. I’m just a tiny little character in the big book of your life. And you’re right. People do die. All of them. Bar none. So what does it even mean? I call someone crazy because not everybody is crazy. I call someone brilliant because not everyone is brilliant. But everybody dies. Squirrels die. Tress die. Skin cells die and your inner organs die and the person you were yesterday’s dead too. So what does it mean to die? Not much.”

— Tommy Wallach

16. “The end of the world revealed the futility of all commemorative plaques.”

— Tommy Wallach

17. “It was incredible, the way that people kept on going, whether they were dying of pancreatic cancer or drug addiction or the apocalypse itself.”

— Tommy Wallach

18. “Then I’ll just tell you that it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. Blame is just a way to keep score, and adults don’t play games like that.”

— Tommy Wallach

19. “Anita felt like she finally understood why love was symbolized by the grotesque pumping organ, always threatening to clog, or break, or attack. Because the heart was the body’s engine, and love was an act of the body. Your mind could tell you who to hate or respect or envy, but only your body – your nostrils and your mouth and the wide, blank canvas of your skin – could tell you who to love.”

— Tommy Wallach

20. “He was the kind of guy who had a unique facial expression dedicated to thinking.”

— Tommy Wallach

21. “Pretty girls never struggled to find someone to talk to, as long as they didn’t need to say anything important.”

— Tommy Wallach

22. “Karass: A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.”

— Tommy Wallach

23. “People don’t like getting older, but they do like changing.”

— Tommy Wallach

24. “And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. Or maybe, Anita thought, terror was actually at the heart of that need. After all, every life ended in an apocalypse, in one way or another.”

— Tommy Wallach

25. “She didn’t look back, but she did break her stride for half a second, which was really the most you could hope for with a girl like that.”

— Tommy Wallach

26. “Fiction described reality better than non-fiction.”

— Tommy Wallach

27. “Young people feel things so deeply, don’t they?′ she said quietly, almost to herself. ‘Everything’s happening for the first time.”

— Tommy Wallach

28. “We spend all our lives standing up on a ledge like this, but we pretend not to notice.”

— Tommy Wallach

29. “He thought he would choke to death on it, on the harsh truth he’d been trying to ignore his entire life: that no matter how bad he wanted it or how he hard he tried to get it, he would never be worthy of anyone’s love.”

— Tommy Wallach

30. “The difference between coldness and coolness was, after all, simply a matter of degree.”

— Tommy Wallach

31. “Life isn’t sugarcoated. Why should coffee be?”

— Tommy Wallach

32. “That was the problem with understanding someone too well – you couldn’t help but forgive them, no matter what they did.”

— Tommy Wallach

33. “This may come as a shock for you, but some of us actually care about stuff.”

— Tommy Wallach

34. “The popular shall become unpopular. The freak shall inherit the Earth.”

— Tommy Wallach

35. “And that means you get to choose what you want to do with your life, instead of life choosing for you.”

— Tommy Wallach

36. “When change loses its magic, then there really isn’t anything left to live for.”

— Tommy Wallach

37. “Back on the beach, everyone was tearing off their costumes piece by piece. It was like some kind of crazy dream, the sight of all those people emerging from their disguises, shedding the fake muscles and plastic armor, the fairy wings and angel wings, and devils horns, all of it piled up like a mass grave for make-believe.”

— Tommy Wallach

38. “As a little kid, Peter had figured that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you’d need in order to be an adult. But it turned out that wasn’t how it worked.”

— Tommy Wallach

39. “Those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.”

— Tommy Wallach

40. “They said no man was an island, and Anita figured that was probably true. But women were; they had to be. And even if someone bothered to sail over and disembark, he’d soon discover that there was always a castle at the center of the island, surrounded by a deep moat, with a rickety drawbridge and archers manning the battlements and a big pot of oil posed above the gate, ready to boil alive anyone who dared to cross the threshold.”

— Tommy Wallach

41. “This is the twenty-first century. The oceans are rising. Mad dictators have access to nuclear weapons. Corporatism and the dumbing down of the media have destroyed the very foundations of democracy. Anyone who isn’t afraid is a moron.” There.”

— Tommy Wallach

42. “Exactly. The dots guy. I’ve always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You’re born, and that’s when you’re standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There’s just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that’s when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective.”

— Tommy Wallach

43. “She wanted to tell him that high school was a little like a play in which everybody got cast prematurely, and he’d ended up with a pretty crappy role. If he could just survive until college, he’d get to try out for a new play, one with plenty of good parts for people like him.”

— Tommy Wallach

44. “He was one of those guys who got mystical and hazy when he was high, and his conversation with the pizza place was one for the ages: “Do we want pepperoni? Oh, man, I don’t even know. Hold on. Guys, do we want pepperoni? No, we don’t pepperoni, even though I have no idea why, because pepperoni is delicious. Actually, I’m going to ask one more time. Guys, do we really not want pepperoni? No? Man, that’s CRAZY.”

— Tommy Wallach

45. “It occurred to Anita that hatred and dislike and even indifference were all luxuries, born of the mistaken belief that anything could last forever.”

— Tommy Wallach

46. “She’d prepared herself for any amount of awkwardness or anger, but no for a hug that was probably the longest she’d ever received from a boy, one of those hugs that made it clear how much the person hugging you was in need of a hug, or believed YOU to be in need of a hug.”

— Tommy Wallach

47. “Instead of a few months, the doctors gave him a year. That was how you could be lucky without being lucky. That was how you could be a winner and still lose.”

— Tommy Wallach

48. “When everything was burning up right in front of you, you could imagine parts of yourself burning along with it-all your disappointments, all the things you’d done that you wish you hadn’t, even all the bad memories.”

— Tommy Wallach

49. “You’re one of those people who’ve been blessed not only with talent, but with self-awareness. And that means you get to choose what you want to do with your life, instead of life choosing for you. But having that power, the power to choose, can be a double edged sword. Because you can choose wrong.”

— Tommy Wallach

50. “Could love really disappear so quickly? Or did that mean it had never been there in the first place?”

— Tommy Wallach