Jean Thompson Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.

Jean Thompson

#3. 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

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

Jean Thompson

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. She didn't look like Louise. She didn't look much like anybody except herself.

Jean Thompson

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Jean Thompson

#15. Nobody knows what to do when there's a tragedy. Nobody practices for it.

Jean Thompson

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

Jean Thompson

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.

Jean Thompson

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

Jean Thompson

#21. 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

#22. She had a heart like a Twinkie, full of oversweet goo, yes, a real junk-food heart.

Jean Thompson