Jean Thompson > Quotes

“You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later."

Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“She had a heart like a Twinkie, full of oversweet goo, yes, a real junk-food heart.”
― Jean Thompson, Who Do You Love: Stories

“The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you’d signed up for a credit card without knowing it.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Nobody knows what to do when there’s a tragedy. Nobody practices for it.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences and bawdy women."

Rolled with laughter. Parent's fear, college student's desire.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“Maybe getting to know a child wasn't entirely unlike meditation. You kept going at it from all different angles, and once in a while something clicked.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“It was still very wet under the trees. A careless tug at a branch might flip cold rainbow-edged drops down your back. And the sky was gray as concrete. But they enjoyed the silence, the soft sucking ground matted with last year's needles.”
― Jean Thompson

“After all, your head only had so much room in it. No surprise if it overflowed once in a while with little bits of sparkle and electrical fizz.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“What a lopsided stumpy mess people made of a family tree these days. The last thing any of them needed was some new little sprig grafted on.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“She didn’t look like Louise. She didn’t look much like anybody except herself.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Conner thought he understood how pride could back up in somebody, get turned around and come out as meanness. But that didn’t make it any easier to put up with.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“You didn't give up wanting things because your life had put them out of reach.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“Head full of beer, fists jammed into his empty pockets, halos of blur around the parking lot lights, yup, one more wasted evening, and even though you wanted to believe you had an infinite supply of evenings available for wasting, you didn’t.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Her parents didn't get it. Life was different now. The future, her future and that of everyone else her age, had blown up in slow motion. She lived the way she did because greed had sucked the juice out of the world and it was no longer possible to get one of those humble but promising jobs that led, with hard work and perseverance, to something that might be considered a career. Instead you competed with ambitious, underpaid people on the Indian subcontinent for the sucky customer service jobs, or you might choose to go the tech route and work as a coding slave, or sign noncompete and binding arbitration agreements with some major corporation that still required human bodies to do their dirty work for them.”
― Jean Thompson, A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

“But it was hard not to think of her mother as she moved from the sink to the oven and back again, tasting and chopping and doing her best impersonation of her mother. She felt, not a presence, exactly. Something more earthbound, a better understanding, perhaps, of her mother and the life she lived. The endless small chores, the worries, never enough time, and always the barely movable obstacles of her husband and children.”
― Jean Thompson, A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

“His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?”
― Jean Thompson, She Poured Out Her Heart

“It was a writers' curse, this verbal embroidery. Never seeing anything as it was, always analyzing and reformulating it. Maybe the entire habit of observation, the thing he trained himself in, was just a nervous tic, a compulsion.”
― Jean Thompson

“Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“I am a tourist of the emotions, visiting only the most well-worn spots. It is romantic, that is, a distortion, to imagine whole lives from the barest observation.”
― Jean Thompson

“Incongruous shiny new video-game parlor.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“The artist on art. How do you get your ideas for stories Mr. Valentine? Well, I simply exploit everything I come into contact with. One ended, of course, by losing all spontaneity. You saw people as characters, sunsets as an excuse for similes -.”
― Jean Thompson

“Once she’d gone, nobody spoke, except for his father who asked what was on next. Blake said it was Newhart.”
― Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home

“Because what were older women meant to do with themselves, besides prop up everybody else's lives and drink too much wine at book club meetings? No one, Laura was convinced, was as invisible and as easily dismissed as the tribe of women like herself, with short gray hair and glasses.”
― Jean Thompson, A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl