Top 100 Jonathan Tropper Quotes
#2. What would you like to do today?" he says. She gives him a funny look. "What are my options?" "Sky's the limit." She considers it for a moment. "Brunch?" "I say the sky's the limit and all you can come up with is brunch?" "I'm just not sure we live under the same sky.
Jonathan Tropper
#3. There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.
Jonathan Tropper
#4. 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
#5. Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn't hear it in time.
Jonathan Tropper
#6. 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
#7. I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.
Jonathan Tropper
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. Everybody dies alone. That's a fact. Some more alone than others.
Jonathan Tropper
#12. 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
#13. You're just the sperm donor, Norm," he says, heading for the door. "That's all you were ever good for. Fucking sperm.
Jonathan Tropper
#14. If there's a perk to having such a fucked up father, it's that he's in no position to judge.
Jonathan Tropper
#15. 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
#16. It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.
Jonathan Tropper
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky.
Jonathan Tropper
#21. Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they're never really gone.
Jonathan Tropper
#22. I have a handful of leather jackets, and I love them all. I think most men my age do, and it can be traced back to the Fonz and Danny Zuko.
Jonathan Tropper
#23. As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it.
Jonathan Tropper
#24. I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.
Jonathan Tropper
#25. Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed - although he doesn't know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you're simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.
Jonathan Tropper
#26. I'm at my desk before nine, and I go all day. I'm not necessarily productive all day, but really, who is?
Jonathan Tropper
#27. That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.
Jonathan Tropper
#28. Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.
Jonathan Tropper
#29. If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty ... shit.
Jonathan Tropper
#30. 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
#31. But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery.
Jonathan Tropper
#32. But the muse won't always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she'd rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.
Jonathan Tropper
#33. And nothing can be resolved until each of you has come to appreciate the other's position
Jonathan Tropper
#34. And even as she holds on to him, like she's drowning, she can feel the familiar anger returning, like an old song that you've heard so many times it's not even a song anymore, just a wasted pathway in your brain that you can never reclaim.
Jonathan Tropper
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it's for the last time?
Jonathan Tropper
#38. You still go to therapy?"
"Nah. I gave up years ago."
"Mental health isn't for everyone.
Jonathan Tropper
#39. 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
#40. Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.
Jonathan Tropper
#41. 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
#42. This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was holding a large birthday cake.
Jonathan Tropper
#43. The thing about people who work in finance is that they consider their job infinitely more important than anything or anyone, and so it's perfectly legitimate to tell everyone else to fuck off because they have a conference call with Dubai.
Jonathan Tropper
#45. The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while.
Jonathan Tropper
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. It's a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you're avoiding your progenitor's defective character. I'm not like him becomes your mantra,
Jonathan Tropper
#49. I keep waiting for the universe to decide things for me, and the thing is, the universe has better things to do.
Jonathan Tropper
#50. Sometimes, commitment is a matter of will. 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.
Jonathan Tropper
#51. Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
Jonathan Tropper
#52. Screenwriting you don't necessarily have to do the job of the costume designer and the prop master and the set designer. It's more just about finding the visuals and finding these characters through dialogue.
Jonathan Tropper
#53. You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.
Jonathan Tropper
#54. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.
Jonathan Tropper
#55. She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.
Jonathan Tropper
#56. 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
#57. Young people with terminal illnesses develop a whimsical, slightly sarcastic sense of humor about it to put everyone else at ease and to serve as shining examples of grace in the face of colossally fucked-up events.
Jonathan Tropper
#58. 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
#59. I feel a dark wave of regret for the kind of person I turned out to be.
Jonathan Tropper
#60. She's pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes.
Jonathan Tropper
#61. Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.
Jonathan Tropper
#62. We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.
Jonathan Tropper
#63. We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.
Jonathan Tropper
#64. Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.
Jonathan Tropper
#65. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don't know.
Jonathan Tropper
#66. I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.
Jonathan Tropper
#67. I don't have a career, I don't have a family, and I don't know what to do next. I've been so determined to escape anything permanent, and now I just feel like I'm nowhere. And what if that's the permanent thing by default?
Jonathan Tropper
#68. Anger you have locked up in you, and that's healthy. I just think you could be a little more judicious
Jonathan Tropper
#70. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.
Jonathan Tropper
#71. I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.
Jonathan Tropper
#72. If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it's because that's how we were raised.
Jonathan Tropper
#73. 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
#74. And someday soon, I'll rest in peace. But till that day does come, I'll rest in pieces.
Jonathan Tropper
#75. if there is an afterlife, then nothing here mattered, and if there isn't an afterlife, nothing here mattered.
Jonathan Tropper
#76. If only all our conflicts could be resolved with a few grunts and a smack in the ass.
Jonathan Tropper
#77. Moments later, there was a loud, protracted crashing sound. "Motherfucker!" "What was that?" "I just backed through the garage door." "Jesus. You okay?" "I'm fine," she said. "The whole damn door came down. I'll just drive over it." "Drive carefully.
Jonathan Tropper
#78. 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
#79. And if you want to know where all the good guys are, we're standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.
Jonathan Tropper
#80. People brush past us on the street in endless waves, leaving somewhere, headed somewhere else, laughing, smoking, speaking into cell phones, completely oblivious to the holocaust of an entire world casually imploding in their midst.
Jonathan Tropper
#82. Being gay is like taking a crash course in human nature," he says. "Your first real glimpse at the dirty underbelly of routine social interaction. A lesser person, " he offers with a wry grin, "Might well become one bitter fuck.
Jonathan Tropper
#83. We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality.
Jonathan Tropper
#84. And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we're all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping, and fucking as much as possible before something bigger comes along and devours us.
Jonathan Tropper
#85. 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
#86. Don't you ever worry about the future?" I asked. Jack shrugged. "This is the future," he said.
Jonathan Tropper
#87. '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
#88. 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
#89. In high school, if you can find a girl who will kiss you and maybe let you touch her breasts and a guy who likes the same movies as you, your world is pretty much complete.
Jonathan Tropper
#90. 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
#91. Why'd you come to me?"
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"I care less about letting you down.
Jonathan Tropper
#92. There is nothing sadder than sitting in a car and having absolutely nowhere to go.
Jonathan Tropper
#93. 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
#94. We don't share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.
Jonathan Tropper
#95. The last time I saw Wade, I attacked him with an office chair. The time before that, I jammed a lit cheesecake up his ass and almost burned his balls off. So it's understandable that his first reaction upon seeing me is to flinch and assume a defensive posture.
Jonathan Tropper
#97. 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
#98. I haven't seen her in a while, haven't returned her calls or stopped thinking about her.
Jonathan Tropper
#99. 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
#100. Over the course of a fifty-year marriage, one bad year isn't very significant. Your marriage might still be there to be saved. But you'll never know if you keep indulging your hate and anger like the world owes you reparations.
Jonathan Tropper
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