Tom Ripley Quotes & Sayings

Tom was not good at math. He'd started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn't understood one lesson, and then another and another. — Amanda Ripley

Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren't, and they weren't. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren't good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed. — Amanda Ripley

In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom's class in Poland, calculators weren't allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly. — Amanda Ripley

Don't you take the past and just put it in a room in the basement and lock the door and never go in there? That's what I do. And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is toss them the key. Say, "Open up, step inside." But you can't because it's dark. And there are demons. - Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley — Greg Sestero