Top 100 Tom Perrotta Quotes
#1. These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.
Tom Perrotta
#2. It was like traveling back in time, meeting the person you used to be, and recognizing her as a friend.
Tom Perrotta
#3. No, it's just like when you're dead and you try to remember being alive, it'll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You'll know it's true, but you won't really believe it.
Tom Perrotta
#4. I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
Tom Perrotta
#5. Done properly," she said, "cunnilingus and fellatio should be more pleasant, and a lot cleaner, than kissing a toilet seat. I hope that answers your question.
Tom Perrotta
#6. It's a matter of dignity," the Chief explained. "At a certain point, that's all you have left.
Tom Perrotta
#7. Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.
Tom Perrotta
#8. Every night was a somber, adults-only slumber party - no giggles or whispers, just lots of coughing and farting and snoring and groaning, the sounds and smells of too many stressed-out of people packed into too small a place.
Tom Perrotta
#9. It was surprisingly crowded, a bunch of middle-aged people, mostly women, moving enthusiastically, if a bit awkwardly, to Prince's "Little Red Corvette," trying to find a way back to their younger, more limber selves.
Tom Perrotta
#11. I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.
Tom Perrotta
#12. As if adult males were completely self-sufficient beings, as if a penis and a five o'clock shadow were all they would ever need to get by.
Tom Perrotta
#13. I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.
Tom Perrotta
#14. There was no dignified way to answer a question about your underwear.
Tom Perrotta
#15. It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays.
Tom Perrotta
#16. He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.
Tom Perrotta
#17. As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.
Tom Perrotta
#18. They were good listeners, worldly yet easily shocked, hungry for details, curious and nonjudgmental at the same time, always happy to give advice, but only if it was requested.
Tom Perrotta
#19. Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?
Tom Perrotta
#20. My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.
Tom Perrotta
#21. Except for a small strip of shin that poked out from between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants, his legs were purely theoretical.
Tom Perrotta
#22. Found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters
Tom Perrotta
#23. I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'
Tom Perrotta
#24. Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.
Tom Perrotta
#25. Laurie herself was more focused on the years when her kids were little, when she felt so necessary and purposeful, a battery all charged up with love. Every day she used it up and every night it got miraculously replenished. Nothing had ever been as good as that.
Tom Perrotta
#26. All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.
Tom Perrotta
#27. Some subjects mixed well with weed, but Chemistry wasn't one of them.
Tom Perrotta
#28. She wasn't a tragic widow, after all, just another woman betrayed by a selfish man. It was a smaller, more familiar role, and a lot easier to play.
Tom Perrotta
#29. There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. (67)
Tom Perrotta
#30. I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
Tom Perrotta
#31. The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."
Tom Perrotta
#32. The world she'd been raised to live in no longer existed.
Tom Perrotta
#33. It's like the Stone Age over there, just sand and rubble and IEDs.
Tom Perrotta
#34. It was a good day for a parade, sunny and unseasonably warm, the sky a Sunday school cartoon of heaven.
Tom Perrotta
#35. It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.
Tom Perrotta
#36. It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.
Tom Perrotta
#37. They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.
Tom Perrotta
#38. A girl from his English class who'd overdosed on sleeping pills after learning of the disappearance of her identical twin.
Tom Perrotta
#39. We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.
Tom Perrotta
#40. What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head.
Tom Perrotta
#41. Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory," Gregory said, "It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.
Tom Perrotta
#42. To this day, she's still sad. Because there's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I'm just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn't hurt me at all.
Tom Perrotta
#43. When your words are futile, you're better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.
Tom Perrotta
#44. My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
Tom Perrotta
#45. From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.
Tom Perrotta
#46. Ever since the development of the spine, the individual had become paramount, the group disregarded. Ghiselle was only following the downhill path of her species.
Tom Perrotta
#47. WE ARE MEMBERS OF THE GUILTY REMNANT. WE HAVE TAKEN A VOW OF SILENCE. WE STAND BEFORE YOU AS LIVING REMINDERS OF GOD'S AWESOME POWER. HIS JUDGMENT IS UPON US.
Tom Perrotta
#48. The cause of what they called the "Sudden Departure" remained unknown,
Tom Perrotta
#49. Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occured.
Tom Perrotta
#50. I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.
Tom Perrotta
#51. I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.
Tom Perrotta
#52. Just a dark shape against an even darker background.
Tom Perrotta
#53. I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
Tom Perrotta
#54. In the far corner of the yard, two squirrels raced up a tree trunk, their little feet scrabbling frantically on the bark. He couldn't tell if they were having a good time or trying to kill each other.
Tom Perrotta
#55. My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.
Tom Perrotta
#56. Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault. (341)
Tom Perrotta
#57. I've matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.
Tom Perrotta
#58. I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.
Tom Perrotta
#59. I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.
Tom Perrotta
#60. After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.
Tom Perrotta
#61. He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.
Tom Perrotta
#62. Oddly emphatic, as if she'd been waiting all day for a chance to discuss the weather.
Tom Perrotta
#63. Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.
Tom Perrotta
#64. I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.
Tom Perrotta
#65. Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
Tom Perrotta
#66. And when Aaron called out for him just then, right on time, there was something beautiful about that, too, the way a little kid needed you for everything and wasn't afraid to say so.
Tom Perrotta
#67. On the first day of Human Sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date
not that she was going on a lot of dates these days
let alone to work.
Tom Perrotta
#68. It had expanded in a nice, welcoming way, becoming ever rounder and softer without losing its essential shapeliness
Tom Perrotta
#69. We're agnostics, she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends. We don't know if there's a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don't.
Tom Perrotta
#70. Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.
Tom Perrotta
#71. The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.
Tom Perrotta
#72. She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.
Tom Perrotta
#73. It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.
Tom Perrotta
#74. Something that had possibly caused the distance between us, but might also bring us back together.
Tom Perrotta
#75. If we'd been on speaking terms, I might've told her that I'd come to think of sex as this long dark tunnel that turns friends into strangers, strangers into friends.
Tom Perrotta
#76. It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.
Tom Perrotta
#77. I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.
Tom Perrotta
#78. It felt good, the whole family together on a sunny morning in a wholesome environment. If it hadn't been for the warshiping God part, he would have happily attended church on a regular basis.
Tom Perrotta
#79. Next time she'd have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she was concerned, the way a guy's face contorted so violently and then relaxed, as if some terrible mystery had just been solved.
Tom Perrotta
#81. I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
Tom Perrotta
#82. Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
Tom Perrotta
#83. Things change all the time - abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.
Tom Perrotta
#84. I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.
Tom Perrotta
#85. Was it possible that they'd crossed without realizing it, each one rounding the corner of the aisle the other one had just vacated at exactly the same time?
Tom Perrotta
#86. Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.
Tom Perrotta
#87. She was the kind of woman who always surprised you with the realization that she was just as lovely as you remembered, though it hardly seemed possible in her absence.
Tom Perrotta
#88. It's a bad dream: my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he's reading aloud in class and wants us to think he's moved by the passage.
Tom Perrotta
#89. Your poor lungs." "We're not gonna live long enough to get cancer. The Bible says there's just seven years of Tribulation after the Rapture.
Tom Perrotta
#90. I'm only human, she told herself. There's not enough room in my heart for everyone.
Tom Perrotta
#91. When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.
Tom Perrotta
#92. The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.
Tom Perrotta
#93. She took care of evyone with the same no-nonsense air of friendliness and good cheer that made her seem so paradoxically wholesome, as if she were convinced that being a slut and being a really nice person were just two things that naturally went together.
Tom Perrotta
#94. We read fiction to satisfy a more basic need - to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten.
Tom Perrotta
#95. Blissfully unaware of the beautiful tradition they'd been chosen to uphold.
Tom Perrotta
#96. When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
Tom Perrotta
#97. If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.
Tom Perrotta
#98. We don't smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith.
Tom Perrotta
#99. Kissing her just then felt perfectly normal and completely self-explanatory, the only possible course of action.
Tom Perrotta
#100. A regimen of hardship and humiliation that at least offered you the dignity of feeling like your existence bore some sort of relationship to reality, that you were no longer engaged in a game of make-believe that would consume the rest of your
Tom Perrotta
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