Top 61 Matthew Norman Quotes
#1. Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out? "I
Matthew Norman
#2. You look good," I tell my reflection. "Hot?" But this last part comes out with a question mark at the end. I've never been good at sales.
Matthew Norman
#3. I instantly like people who laugh at my jokes. It's a weakness of mine.
Matthew Norman
#5. We're all damaged. Every single beautiful, stupid, precious one of us. Damaged, damaged, damaged.
Matthew Norman
#6. Not sure, but I tell her that it does because I'm Midwestern and agreeable. She
Matthew Norman
#7. You ever wonder if it's really not more complicated than that?" I ask. "That maybe everyone else is right, and people like you and me just need to quit looking for stuff to be depressed about?" She looks up, and then back at her dirt, dismissing this stupidity without comment. When
Matthew Norman
#8. Right when you find yourself not thinking about her at all, there she'll be, right at the end of the story to fuck with your head one last time. She
Matthew Norman
#9. All the stuff she says on the radio. It's just fear. The world is leaving people like her behind, and it scares the shit out of her.
Matthew Norman
#10. Sonya's a real person, like your Mother. Thirty years ago, that was your Mother's biggest flaw in my eyes, and now that's the thing I love most about Sonya. It's funny how things end, isn't it?
Matthew Norman
#11. I've been thinking about your Father a lot lately, and I've realized something. I married Gary specifically for the fact that he wasn't Curtis. If your Father has an opposite, it's Gary. I just need to decide if I want to spend the rest of my life with someone I married by default.
Matthew Norman
#12. The lesson here . . . Sometimes people throw things away. That doesn't mean those things aren't really, really good. Most of the time, it just means that person didn't know what they had. I'm
Matthew Norman
#13. Whoa," I say. "Look how tall he is." "Actors are always midgets in person," says Brandon, "But writers ... they're giants.
Matthew Norman
#14. They didn't hate her when you were in high school. They made fun of her. She was the butt of jokes. But they didn't hate her. That's what people do now. They don't disagree, they hate.
Matthew Norman
#15. I was modeling sunglasses for a while, but that got kinda shady. No
Matthew Norman
#16. I don't think - I begin, but then I stop there. Strangely enough, this sounds like a full, declarative sentence, as if I'm standing in a bar shouting out one of my most obvious character flaws. I don't think!
Matthew Norman
#17. No," I say. "Actually, the first time I saw one in real life, I thought of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Return of the Jedi." "OK, well, I officially take back my previous comment about you knowing a thing or two about vaginas." "Understandable." "What
Matthew Norman
#18. Two hours with my grandpa felt like eternity, but also like not long enough. I should have come sooner. I should have called him more this past year. I should have watched more Cubs games with him, and I should have been better at being his grandson.
Matthew Norman
#19. It's probably unhealthy to miss a life that never actually existed - to
Matthew Norman
#20. There's a line in one of my dad's novels about the most beautiful parts of the female anatomy being the ones that are the most innocent - the ones that have never been scandalized by nudity.
Matthew Norman
#21. If my penis were a writer/director, it would be Woody Allen - small, neurotic, and, frankly, hit or miss.
Matthew Norman
#22. Marriage isn't easy, Andy," he says. "You love someone in a specific time and place. But you have no idea what they'll become. People change. Sometimes, they change so much you hardly even recognize them anymore." For
Matthew Norman
#23. Married silence is a specific kind of silence, typically one in which the woman goes mute while the man pretends as if it's perfectly normal that she hasn't spoken in hours.
Matthew Norman
#24. giant hard drive in my head, so I'm forced to obsess over it all like
Matthew Norman
#25. The captain of a ship can run a great ship, but he can't do anything about the tides.
Matthew Norman
#26. Do you ever stop talking?" I say. "Seriously, it's like you have a superarticulate form of Tourette syndrome.
Matthew Norman
#27. Anna is the sort of woman who writers write about, Tom. Somewhere in the third act, women like her save characters like you and me from ourselves. She's the loveliest literary device in the world.
Matthew Norman
#28. She technically apologized yesterday, but it was one of those married-people apologies, more of a tactical move than anything else, a way of moving on with things.
Matthew Norman
#29. Never trust someone who isn't miserable at least half of the time.
Matthew Norman
#30. Actually, the first time I saw one in real life, I thought of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Return of the Jedi." "OK,
Matthew Norman
#31. I'm comfortable with who I am," I say, which is a funny thing to say while shaming my own body in a full-length mirror. "Shut
Matthew Norman
#32. You ever notice that like seventy-five percent of the dudes in America look like the bad guy in The Karate Kid?" I say. "Don't
Matthew Norman
#33. Suspect scotch is something you have to convince yourself to enjoy, like sushi or the last few Radiohead albums, but I can't deny the result is nice.
Matthew Norman
#34. Significant thins shouldn't begin or end at Applebee's.
Matthew Norman
#35. When you're having sex again, it makes you wonder why you weren't before. What could possibly have been bad enough to make you stop doing THAT?
Matthew Norman
#36. I have to go back home for a while." "Ohio?" "Omaha." "Right. Omaha. Why?
Matthew Norman
#37. I'm like a poker player, bluffing with whatever cards equal a really shitty hand. I should mention that I have no fucking idea how to play poker. "You
Matthew Norman
#38. I suspect scotch is something you have to convince yourself to enjoy, like sushi or the last few Radiohead albums, but I can't deny the result is nice. "You
Matthew Norman
#39. Gary has made the classic mistake of equating precise cheekbones, perfect breasts, and a vague association with philanthropy as the signs of a good woman.
Matthew Norman
#40. They're always like, 'Would my character really do this or really do that?' And I'm like, 'Who gives a shit? Just make them do it, you coward. Don't be so passive.' You and I, we're in charge of what we can do and what we can't do.
Matthew Norman
#41. It's like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead.
Matthew Norman
#42. He arrived to find that she'd left, discovering then that he was all alone. Even the birds had gone. They'd abandoned their nest on the windowsill, and he was somehow certain that they'd never come back.
Matthew Norman
#43. Like pretty much every cat I've ever met, Jeter swings back and forth between loving me and trying to murder me, so I never know exactly what I'm getting.
Matthew Norman
#44. Sometimes in life, it doesn't matter that you've just woken up on a floor. Or that you haven't brushed your teeth. Or that your hair is a mess and you're wearing the clothes you slept in. Sometimes you just have to be polite.
Matthew Norman
#45. Then we lapse into silence. It's these silences that do damage, that reveal glimpses of the distressed foundation struggling under the weight of things.
Matthew Norman
#46. Eating with children at a restaurant is like eating with a live grenade. It's going to explode every time. You just don't know when.
Matthew Norman
#48. I have to speak carefully now because I have this strange habit of imitating British people without even realizing that I'm doing it.
Matthew Norman
#49. Maybe that's just what moving on is, not getting over, but skipping over.
Matthew Norman
#50. That's the thing I hate most about my brain, the way it stores and catalogs things, all this dumb shit on a giant hard drive in my head, so I'm forced to obsess over it all like a crazy person.
Matthew Norman
#51. In my career, I've found that only annoying people knock on open doors.
Matthew Norman
#52. The most important people in this man's life - the people who have mattered to him most - aren't my Mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.
Matthew Norman
#53. I think you'll be a great teacher, said Gary. That's his role in my life: blind encourager and ambassador of false senses of security.
Matthew Norman
#54. I'm not an alcoholic - I don't have the discipline to become one - but,
Matthew Norman
#55. That's me, giving myself a tough-love speech. I'm going to start doing that more often, I've decided. One might as well put his inner monologue to good use.
Matthew Norman
#56. We hold on to the shitty things the tightest, for some reason. And
Matthew Norman
#57. This house has endured three of my Dad's four wives, and so over the last few decades it's been a home-size mood ring, changing to the styles and temperaments of its female inhabitants.
Matthew Norman
#58. I know nothing," I say, cheerfully.
"You never seem to. Have you ever wondered why that is?"
"It's very deliberate. I've found that knowledge is usually a burden. I prefer to be surprised and then eventually horrified.
Matthew Norman
#59. Generally speaking, it's difficult not to be at least mildly terrified of a girl who might, at any moment, take her shirt off.
Matthew Norman
#60. They're all about forty, I'd guess, but they could pass for thirty in that way that handsome gay men can seemingly defy the basic rules of nature.
Matthew Norman
#61. I'm leaning on an old guy trick here, claiming my wife is being a typical irrational woman right as she begins saying things that I don't want to hear.
Matthew Norman
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