Jean Thompson Quotes & Sayings

What a lopsided stumpy mess people made of a family tree these days. The last thing any of them needed was some new little sprig grafted on. — Jean Thompson

They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself? — Jean Thompson

He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no. — Jean Thompson

Maybe getting to know a child wasn't entirely unlike meditation. You kept going at it from all different angles, and once in a while something clicked. — Jean Thompson

Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents. — Jean Thompson

Conner thought he understood how pride could back up in somebody, get turned around and come out as meanness. But that didn't make it any easier to put up with. — Jean Thompson

Nobody knows what to do when there's a tragedy. Nobody practices for it. — Jean Thompson

You know, your family's exactly like I imagined them. Exactly like you." "What's that supposed to mean?" "You're like the blackbirds. The blondbirds." "Very funny." "They're very nice. You always talk like they're Norwegian hillbillies or something. — Jean Thompson

She didn't look like Louise. She didn't look much like anybody except herself. — Jean Thompson

It was still very wet under the trees. A careless tug at a branch might flip cold rainbow-edged drops down your back. And the sky was gray as concrete. But they enjoyed the silence, the soft sucking ground matted with last year's needles. — Jean Thompson

The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences and bawdy women.
Rolled with laughter. Parent's fear, college student's desire. — Jean Thompson

He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple. — Jean Thompson

We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers. — Jean Thompson

The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you'd signed up for a credit card without knowing it. — Jean Thompson

Did poverty in itself lead to moral failings, such as crime? Was "goodness" something that could be objectified and measured? Did society benefit directly from individual virtue, and therefore have incentive to promote it? Did our concepts of goodness have their foundations in religious and spiritual practice? What about the notion that money was the root of all evil, and those monks and nuns who felt it necessary to deny themselves material wealth? — Jean Thompson

His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it. — Jean Thompson

I am a tourist of the emotions, visiting only the most well-worn spots. It is romantic, that is, a distortion, to imagine whole lives from the barest observation. — Jean Thompson

The evening is nearly over. Before long it will be last call and Good Night, Ladies. Only a few more minutes and exhilaration will start its inevitable leakage. Even the best, dizziest times have that moment of deflation when people realize that everything has already happened. But for now all possibilities are intact. — Jean Thompson

After all, your head only had so much room in it. No surprise if it overflowed once in a while with little bits of sparkle and electrical fizz. — Jean Thompson

She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later.
Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this. — Jean Thompson

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever? — Jean Thompson

Head full of beer, fists jammed into his empty pockets, halos of blur around the parking lot lights, yup, one more wasted evening, and even though you wanted to believe you had an infinite supply of evenings available for wasting, you didn't. — Jean Thompson

He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session. — Jean Thompson

She had a heart like a Twinkie, full of oversweet goo, yes, a real junk-food heart. — Jean Thompson

Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating. — Jean Thompson