Tommy Wallach > Quotes

“The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world. You're part of this cosmic community of people who've thought about this thing, whatever it happens to be.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“You didn’t win the game of life by losing the least. That would be one of those—what were they called again?—Pyrrhic victories. Real winning was having the most to lose, even if it meant you might lose it all. Even though it meant you would lose it all, sooner or later.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he’d always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“You don’t wanna go out of this world with regrets. If there’s some-
thing you want to do, you do it. You take this life by the balls and you tell it that you existed.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Do you think it is better to fail at something worthwhile, or succeed at something meaningless”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“the fundamental rule of life: Things were never so bad that they couldn’t get worse.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Beauty always made a target of its possessor. Every other human quality was hidden easily enough – intelligence, talent, selfishness, even madness – but beauty would not be concealed.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Ardor right over," Eliza said. They laughed. The asteroid was a little bigger now, brighter, and still they went on laughing. Laughing in the face of what they couldn't predict or change or control. Would it be fire and brimstone? Would it be Armageddon? Or would it be a second chance? Eliza held tight to her friends, laughing, and a pair of hands land soft as feathers on her shoulders, like the hands of a ghost, laughing and laughing as Ardor swept along its fated course, laughing and through that laughter, praying. Praying for forgiveness. Praying for grace. Praying for mercy.
















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― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“She was miserable because she kept hoping things would change. If she could eradicate the hope, she could eradicate the sadness.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Love is the exception to the law of diminishing returns.”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little less alone in the world.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“My mom told me once that she wouldn't be a kid again for a million bucks. She said things hurt more when you don't have any perspective on pain.

That's true.

But doesn't everyone want to be young and hot forever?

They only think they want it, Parker. But nobody really wants anything forever. Just for longer than they get it.”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“They said no man was an island, and Anita figured that was probably true. But women were; they had to be. And even if someone bothered to sail over and disembark, he'd soon discover that there was always a castle at the center of the island, surrounded by a deep moat, with a rickety drawbridge and archers manning the battlements and a big pot of oil posed above the gate, ready to boil alive anyone who dared to cross the threshold.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. Or maybe, Anita thought, terror was actually at the heart of that need. After all, every life ended in an apocalypse, in one way or another.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“There's a word in Portuguese that my dad wrote about in one of his books: saudade.
It's the sadness you feel for something that isn't gone yet, but will be. The sadness of lost causes. The sadness of being alive.”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“Anita felt like she finally understood why love was symbolized by the grotesque pumping organ, always threatening to clog, or break, or attack. Because the heart was the body's engine, and love was an act of the body. Your mind could tell you who to hate or respect or envy, but only your body--your nostrils and your mouth and the wide, blank canvas of your skin--could tell you who to love.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Instead of a few months, the doctors gave him a year. That was how you could be lucky without being lucky. That was how you could be a winner and still lose.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Why does anyone fall in love with anyone? I don’t believe we each have some single special person waiting for us out there, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’ve been in love too many times over the years to buy into that old canard. It’s more a question of timing you know? As if we all have these elaborate locks inside our hearts that are constantly changing shape, and every once in a while, someone happens along with the perfect key. Love is nothing more than a fortuitous collision of circumstances. And then you discover you’ve ended up spending fifty years with someone.”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“Just another little piece of utterly irrelevant history, aspiring to permanence, doomed to oblivion.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“Karass: A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“As a little kid, Peter had figured that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you'd need in order to be an adult. But it turned out that wasn't how it worked.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“I think that kids have a knack for detecting happiness, but they lose it as they get older. They have to. Otherwise they'd notice how unhappy everybody else is, and they'd never be able to be happy themselves.”
― Tommy wallach , Thanks for the Trouble

“Life isn't sugarcoated. Why should coffee be?”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“Today was just another shit day in a life that sometimes felt like a factory specializing in the construction of shit days.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“People don't like getting older, but they do like changing. Staying the same is a kind of death.”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“Young people feel things so deeply, don't they?' she said quietly, almost to herself. 'Everything's happening for the first time.”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without movies or recorded music or... or... Interet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say!”
― Tommy Wallach, Thanks for the Trouble

“Why is it that the bad shit in our lives always seems to take up so much more mental space than the good stuff? I wrote. Is that part of being a person, or just part of being me?

I think about that question all the time.

Do you have an answer?

I don't think that questions like that have answers. An optimistic person would probably say that the bad things stick out because they're not as common as the good things.

Are you an optimistic person?

No.”
― Tommy wallach , Thanks for the Trouble

“She looked up toward the sky, toward the implacable sparkle of good old Ardor, and saw that the two of them—she and the asteroid—were caught up I a battle of wills. In that moment, she stopped being afraid of it, even dared it to come, because she knew thre was mo way it could crave death as much as she craved life.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up