Tom Perrotta > Quotes

“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, Election

“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, Joe College

“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, Little Children

“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, Joe College

“There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”
― Tom Perrotta, Little Children

“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, The Abstinence Teacher

“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, The Leftovers

“Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“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, The Leftovers

“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.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“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, The Leftovers

“If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.”
― Tom Perrotta, Little Children

“Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?”
― Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher

“Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer — that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“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, Little Children

“We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“I’ve matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“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, Little Children

“He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them. I doubt I'll be lying on my deathbed in forty or fifty years, congratulating myself on the fact that I never had sex in an airplane with a handsome Italian businessman, or patting myself on the back for all those years of involuntary celibacy I endured after my divorce. If recent experience is any guide, I'll probably be lying in that hospital bed with my body full of tubes, sneaking glances at the handsome young doctor, wishing that I hadn't been such a coward. Wishing I'd taken more risks, made more mistakes, and accumulated more regrets. Just wishing I'd lived when I had the chance.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher

“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, Little Children

“When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you're unsually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and the kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the rent.”
― Tom Perrotta, Little Children

“He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers; never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him everyday--that beauty was only a part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.”
― Tom Perrotta, Little Children

“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, The Leftovers

“... Because that's what privilege is-the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you're a good person.”
― Tom Perrotta, Mrs. Fletcher

“I’m only human, she told herself. There’s not enough room in my heart for everyone.”
― Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers