Top 100 Tropper Quotes
#1. Everyone 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, from The Book of Joe
Madelon Phillips
#2. In The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper, Wayne is talking to Joe about "days that matter". Wayne says, "It's simple really. We were doing what we wanted to do, instead of what we expected ourselves to do.
Jonathan Tropper
#3. The contemporary authors I most admire are Nick Hornby and Jonathan Tropper.
Mike Greenberg
#4. 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
#7. 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
#8. Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.
Jonathan Tropper
#9. There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.
Jonathan Tropper
#10. None of us makes eye contact. We have pretty much had it with each other. We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure. - Judd Foxman
Jonathan Tropper
#11. 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
#12. Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn't hear it in time.
Jonathan Tropper
#13. The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.
Jonathan Tropper
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. But that's one of the questions I've learned not to ask, because I'll get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you're not yet a complete person.
Jonathan Tropper
#22. Everybody dies alone. That's a fact. Some more alone than others.
Jonathan Tropper
#23. You OK?" she says, raising her eyebrows. "You're teetering."
He nods and steadies himself against the wall. "Aren't we all," he says.
Jonathan Tropper
#24. 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
#25. You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you're not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.
Jonathan Tropper
#26. Any schmuck can be unhappy when things aren't going well, but it takes a truly unique variety of schmuck; a real innovator in the schmuck field to be unhappy when things are going as great as they are for me.
Tropper Jonathan
#28. 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
#29. You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have.
Jonathan Tropper
#31. 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
#32. I occasionally experience the discomfort of people assuming my work is autobiographical.
Jonathan Tropper
#33. It was one of those playful arguments that we would carry with us unresolved into old age.
Jonathan Tropper
#34. But moving from conversation to violence is just as hard as moving from flirting to kissing. There's that leap you have to take, to shed your inhibitions and expose your naked impulses.
Jonathan Tropper
#35. If there's a perk to having such a fucked up father, it's that he's in no position to judge.
Jonathan Tropper
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.
Jonathan Tropper
#39. I want to explain everything to him, show him that it's really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.
Jonathan Tropper
#40. Relationships don't come with a warranty and being in love is no guarantee of a happy ending.
Jonathan Tropper
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I may not be old but I'm too old to have this much nothing
Jonathan Tropper
#45. I'm really not a fan of voiceovers; I think they become a crutch.
Jonathan Tropper
#46. 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
#47. Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they're never really gone.
Jonathan Tropper
#48. Until you found your way out of the woods, it was reassuring to find other people lost in them with you.
Jonathan Tropper
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. As always, the first instant he sees her, he can feel his heart shut down, the way you do in those first moment after impact, or, he supposes, when you're drowning. Love or panic. The two have always been fairly indistinguishable to him.
Jonathan Tropper
#52. As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it.
Jonathan Tropper
#53. I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.
Jonathan Tropper
#54. 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
#56. You lost your wife, Douglas. My heartbreaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don't even get to mourn.
Jonathan Tropper
#57. 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
#58. That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.
Jonathan Tropper
#59. 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
#60. [T]here are some people out there who don't wait for what comes next. They decide what should come next and they go and make it happen.
Jonathan Tropper
#61. I'd been forced into a movie, and there was nothing to do but follow the script.
Jonathan Tropper
#62. I'm living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.
Jonathan Tropper
#63. If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty ... shit.
Jonathan Tropper
#64. 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
#65. He'd continue to cry passionately, long after he'd forgotten why he was crying to begin with.
Jonathan Tropper
#66. But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery.
Jonathan Tropper
#67. Healing is a deeply private process and, honestly, you're not welcome to be a part of it. But you will have given me a short furlough from the dark, sorry prison of my mind, and that gift, precious in its own right, is really the best you can hope to offer.
Jonathan Tropper
#68. 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
#69. Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's.
Jonathan Tropper
#70. Don't you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?
Jonathan Tropper
#71. And nothing can be resolved until each of you has come to appreciate the other's position
Jonathan Tropper
#72. 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
#73. The tears come to my eyes so fast, there's just no way to stop them.
Jonathan Tropper
#74. In my family, we don't so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.
Jonathan Tropper
#75. And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being
angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning
yourself without thinking about it.
Jonathan Tropper
#76. 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
#77. I loved her for the way she embraced the unknown, how she opened herself up to every experience. When I was with her, she opened me up, too, stirred my passion and heightened my every sensation. Which was great, until she left me and all my heightened senses to deal with the heartache of losing her.
Jonathan Tropper
#78. 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
#79. What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it's for the last time?
Jonathan Tropper
#80. I may have overmothered you and screwed you up in ways large and small, but I think it's time you took some measure of responsibility for where you choose to put your own penis.
Jonathan Tropper
#81. To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it's too late is to become divinely fucked up.
Jonathan Tropper
#82. When did being right become worthless, and being at fault irrelevant?
Jonathan Tropper
#83. Sometimes it's heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they've become. Maybe that's why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.
Jonathan Tropper
#84. It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.
Jonathan Tropper
#85. You still go to therapy?"
"Nah. I gave up years ago."
"Mental health isn't for everyone.
Jonathan Tropper
#86. 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
#87. We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.
Jonathan Tropper
#88. People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald's for making them fat pigs.
Jonathan Tropper
#89. 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
#90. You could fill an airlift to Africa with all the food generated by one dead Jew.
Jonathan Tropper
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I was holding a large birthday cake.
Jonathan Tropper
#94. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, 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. We don't share thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them.
Jonathan Tropper
#95. Forgiveness is a comfort, but it doesn't bring back what you lost
Jonathan Tropper
#96. 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
#97. Bllod will separate, if need be, but its call is primordial, and it won't be refused.
Jonathan Tropper
#98. 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
#99. And as the room starts to fill with the first somber-faced neighbors coming to pay their respects, it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.
Jonathan Tropper
#100. Whatever the opposite of a plan is, that's what I've got.
Jonathan Tropper
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