“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, quote from Little Children
“It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from 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, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“The thing was to wear a bathing suit and look good in it, to somehow make yourself worthy of the scenario you were volunteering for.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
“He spun on his heels and jogged backward across the goal line, the ball raised triumphantly overhead, a gesture that looked arrogant when the pros did it on TV but felt right just then, allowing him to watch his teammates as they came charging joyfully down the field to join him. Todd spiked the ball and waited for them, his arms stretched wide, his chest heaving as if he were trying to suck the whole night into his lungs. All he wished was that Sarah had been there to see it, to know him as he’d known himself streaking down the wide-open field, not some jock hero scoring the winning touchdown, but a grown man experiencing an improbable moment of grace.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
“Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy's breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy's skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they'd lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, competing for attention, relying on each other for companionship and emotional support, forming the intense, convoluted, and probably unhealthy bond that for better and worse would become the center of both of their identities, fodder for years of therapy, if they could ever figure out a way to pay for it. It wasn't going to be an easy future, Sarah understood that, but it felt REAL to her -- so palpable and close at hand, so in keeping with what she knew of her own life -- that it almost seemed inevitable, the place they'd been heading all along. It was enough to make her wonder how she'd ever managed to believe in the alternate version, the one where the Prom King came and made everything better.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“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, quote from Little Children
“Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have blamed it all on a moment of weakness. At least that was how she described it to herself, though the explanation always seemed a bit threadbare. After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness after 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, quote from Little Children
“He could easily imagine what people would say if they could see him now: exactly the same thing they'd say if someone had told them that Ray from work was a transvestite or that Ted from next door had anonymous gay sex at highway rest stops. They'd shake their heads with their heads with the standard combination of amusement, pity, and smug superiority, and say, Ha-ha-ha, poor Ray. Ho-ho-ho, poor Ted. At least I'm not like that. But we want what we want, Richard thought, and there's not much we can do about it.”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from Little Children
Tom Perrotta
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
Born date August 13, 1961
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“Любви все возрасты покорны;
Но юным, девственным сердцам
Ее порывы благотворны,
Как бури вешние полям”
― Alexander Pushkin, quote from Evžen Oněgin
“Don't put your purpose in one place and expect to see progress made somewhere else.”
― Epictetus, quote from Discourses and Selected Writings
“I think a relationship is like two stories,” I say at last, feeling my way cautiously through my thoughts. “Like…two open books, pressing together, and all the words mingle into one big, epic story. But if they stop mingling…” I lift my glass for emphasis. “Then they turn into two stories again. And that’s when it’s over.” I clap my hands together, spilling champagne. “The books shut. The End.”
― Sophie Kinsella, quote from Surprise Me
“My first choice would be to give you more god children, but that would be far too cruel a thing to do—to them.”
― Allison Tebo, quote from The Reluctant Godfather
“The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Seraphina
The Black Obelisk
Froi of the Exiles
Pygmalion
Travels with Charley...
Confessions of an Ug...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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