Tropper Quotes & Sayings

I've been treating my life as this pit stop, just kind of regrouping before I move on. But it's been seven years, and I never moved on. I haven't done anything. I just ... stopped. — Jonathan Tropper

Don't you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already? — Jonathan Tropper

Why'd you come to me?"
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"I care less about letting you down. — Jonathan Tropper

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts. — Jonathan Tropper

The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better. — Jonathan Tropper

It wasn't that she didn't love me, I knew that she did, and that actually made it worse. If someone leaves you because they don't love you, it's a tough break, but as they say, life's a bitch, get a helmet. But if someone loves you and leaves you anyway, you enter a whole new realm of self-doubt and recrimination, what psychologists call the what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-me syndrome. — Jonathan Tropper

It's hard to imagine your heart simply stopping, but at the same time, it's hard to believe that it didn't give up years ago. — Jonathan Tropper

Maybe yelling back is a kind of marital diplomacy — Jonathan Tropper

You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have. — Jonathan Tropper

I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into ... something. — Jonathan Tropper

If you're eating an ice cream cone, it's just very hard to believe that things have gone completely to shit. That there isn't still hope. — Jonathan Tropper

If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it's because that's how we were raised. — Jonathan Tropper

It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, 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. — Jonathan Tropper

But that's why you pay for insurance, right? If you never file a claim, then they've beaten you. — Jonathan Tropper

If anything, love is just a starting point. Then life intrudes, along with the personal baggage you've spent years packing, and things get royally and irrevocably fucked up. You can get bitter or you can keep trying. Most people do some of each. — Jonathan Tropper

Rest stops have always made him strangely happy. He couldn't say why. Just the idea of everyone on their way somewhere, united by wanderlust, no one belonging more than anyone else. — Jonathan Tropper

But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery. — Jonathan Tropper

Above us, the moon hangs like a fat blister on the feel of the sky, ready to burst in a spray of viscous white pus
chap 22. — Jonathan Tropper

An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday. — Jonathan Tropper

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. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it. — Jonathan Tropper

She holds on to a rung of the ladder while I tread water a foot or so in front of her. After a few moments, my eyes have adjusted to that I can look into hers. I flash back to Horry and Wendy, looking at each other in this exact spot a few hours ago, this haunted pool that seems to pull dead and buried love to its surface. — Jonathan Tropper

You could fill an airlift to Africa with all the food generated by one dead Jew. — Jonathan Tropper

I haven't seen her in a while, haven't returned her calls or stopped thinking about her. — Jonathan Tropper

Okay. Here's what I've learned. You can live your life being nice to everyone, you can be a loving son, a moderately decent student, never do hard drugs or impregnate anyone's daughter, be an all-around good guy and live in harmony with all of God's creatures. But crash one stolen Mercedes in front of the police station when you're fifteen years old and they'll never let you forget it. — Jonathan Tropper

You can do everything differently in a novel. Hero narrates the novel; we're in his head. You're hearing all his thought processes and you're hearing him call himself out on his bad behavior. You don't have the benefit of that narrator in a movie. What you see a character do, very often, becomes that much more important because you don't have him editorializing it for you. — Jonathan Tropper

It's life, that's all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it. — Jonathan Tropper

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

He doesn't so much fall in love as dive-bomb it like a kamikaze pilot, fearless and at full throttle. He used to look at this propensity as a gift, then a curse, and now understands it to be just another way in which he is broken. — Jonathan Tropper

Time doesn't heal as much as it buries things in the undergrowth of your brain, where they lie in wait to ambush you when you least expect it. — Jonathan Tropper

I love Hailey and what we have works. Shes's beautiful, she's smart, she's a great mother, and she's heads above what I ever thought I could see in myself. — Jonathan Tropper

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

In my defense, I was young and there was an open bar. — Jonathan Tropper

It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids. — Jonathan Tropper

If there's a perk to having such a fucked up father, it's that he's in no position to judge. — Jonathan Tropper

Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late. — Jonathan Tropper

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was holding a large birthday cake. — Jonathan Tropper

Due to some mental hiccup I can't explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket. — Jonathan Tropper

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order. — Jonathan Tropper

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see. — Jonathan Tropper

Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. — Jonathan Tropper

You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving. — Jonathan Tropper

The tears come to my eyes so fast, there's just no way to stop them. — Jonathan Tropper

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

Attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at bay with facials, compression undergarments, and aggressively fashionable skirts bought off the rack at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They run on treadmills, these women, work out with personal trainers and play tennis at the club, but still their hips widen, their legs thicken, their breasts sag. Genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart. — Jonathan Tropper

I'll tell you the same thing I told your father. We make mistakes. They don't make us. If they did, we'd all be royally fucked, especially a coupe of assholes like us."
I grin at his last remark, and finally find some words to say, even though I'm not sure I possess the conciliatory feelings to match my town. "You could learn a lot from an asshole."
Dugan smiles at that, and it's the first time I've ever seen him do it. "I guess so. — Jonathan Tropper

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

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting. — Jonathan Tropper

Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people. — Jonathan Tropper

At this point in my life, I'm not looking for any happy endings. I'm just looking to get things started. — Jonathan Tropper

Arms stop me from crumpling like a rag doll. Sometimes you don't need to talk things out. Sometimes, with the right person, things just need some time to percolate on their own, without the messy lunge and parry of discussion to hinder them. — Jonathan Tropper

Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child. — Jonathan Tropper

If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack in the ass. — Jonathan Tropper

Here's the thing. I don't think you're in love with her, not all the way. If you were, I think you would seem more certain about it. More jazzed. You wouldn't hug me the way we hug, and say the things you say to me. You definitely wouldn't have kissed me the other day the way you did. I'm not saying you're in love with me. I'm just saying that whatever this thing is you feel toward me, this thing we're both too scared to mention, I don't think it could exist if you were head over heels in live with Hope. And if that's the case, if youre not head over heels in love with her, you shouldnt marry her.
P.268 — Jonathan Tropper

The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while. — Jonathan Tropper

I'm not the same person I was. I'm fucked up." I give her a sideways glance. "I am," she says. "You haven't even scratched the surface."
"I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another. — Jonathan Tropper

The really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies. — Jonathan Tropper

And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire. — Jonathan Tropper

We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, about finances and fiancees and soon-to-be ex wives, about the sex we're not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams. — Jonathan Tropper

I still enjoy the tactile sensation of holding a book. But when I need to read fast for work, I use the Kindle App on my iPad. — Jonathan Tropper

Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they're never really gone. — Jonathan Tropper

The reason wisdom is meant to be imparted is because you acquire it only after it's too late to apply to yourself. — Jonathan Tropper

'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced. — Jonathan Tropper

If so, how do we feel about it?" "We are numb. — Jonathan Tropper

I'm generally somebody who hopes for the best. It's not what one ought to do in my line of work [screenwriting], but it is what I do. — Jonathan Tropper

At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent. — Jonathan Tropper

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it. — Jonathan Tropper

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

You're terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you. — Jonathan Tropper

She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over. — Jonathan Tropper

And beneath the chaos of the moment, Denise becomes aware of a painful truth about herself: she is never as deeply in love with a man as she is in the moment he leaves her. — Jonathan Tropper

The music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there. — Jonathan Tropper

Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way." Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. "That's a pretty dire outlook on life," she says. "What's the point in working to be happy if you're going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it's time to pay the bill? — Jonathan Tropper

That's the problem with college kids. I blame Hollywood for skewing their perspective. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily-ever-after is a foregone conclusion. So there we were, the pretty blond girl milking her very slight congenital limp in order to seem damaged and more interesting, and the nervous boy with the ridiculous hair trying so hard to be clever, the two of us hypnotized by the syncopated rhythms of our furiously beating hearts and throbbing loins. That stupid, desperate, horny kid I was, standing obliviously on the fault line of embryonic love, when really, what he should have been doing was running for his life. — Jonathan Tropper

It's funny, or tragic, really, how an ordinary act like helping someone with their homework could be the inadvertent trigger for almost a decade of silent suffering. — Jonathan Tropper

The old expression goes, a good speech is like a woman's skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject. — Jonathan Tropper

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

Dad didn't believe in God, but he was a lifelong member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can. So his actual death itself was less an event than a final sad detail. — Jonathan Tropper

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy. — Jonathan Tropper

Whatever the opposite of a plan is, that's what I've got. — Jonathan Tropper

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it. — Jonathan Tropper

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms. — Jonathan Tropper

Until you found your way out of the woods, it was reassuring to find other people lost in them with you. — Jonathan Tropper

And nothing can be resolved until each of you has come to appreciate the other's position — Jonathan Tropper

You get married to get an ally against your family. — Jonathan Tropper

Relationships don't come with a warranty and being in love is no guarantee of a happy ending. — Jonathan Tropper

One train wreck at a time, I always say. — Tropper Jonathan

Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood. — Jonathan Tropper

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person. — Jonathan Tropper

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

The cobbler's children go barefoot, — Jonathan Tropper

Back (thank god for office accessorizing, the last playground of the reluctant adult). — Jonathan Tropper

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

In real life, you don't get to choose what you forget. — Jonathan Tropper

I totally remember what it felt like to be so full ... Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you're bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon ... You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then ... it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe — Jonathan Tropper

Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model," he says, and he would know. "It will never feel as good as it looks. — Jonathan Tropper

Few things are more pathetic than an unemployed man with a business card.
P.15 — Jonathan Tropper

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

And someday soon, I'll rest in peace. But till that day does come, I'll rest in pieces. — Jonathan Tropper