“Love is the exception to the law of diminishing returns.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“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, quote from 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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“Life isn't sugarcoated. Why should coffee be?”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“Life would take everything from you eventually. So who would be so stupid to leave someone they loved by choice?”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“When change loses its magic, then there really isn't anything left to live for.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“Exactly. The dots guy. I've always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You're born, and that's when you're standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There's just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that's when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“Back on the beach, everyone was tearing off their costumes piece by piece. It was like some kind of crazy dream, the sight of all those people emerging from their disguises, shedding the fake muscles and plastic armor, the fairy wings and angel wings, and devils horns, all of it piled up like a mass grave for make-believe.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from 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 antibiotics or anesthetics. The tedium of a world without movies or recorded music or... or... Internet 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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“People don't like getting older, but they do like changing”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“Alana – still dressed as a pirate- chambers over the counter like that evil Japanese ghost in the Ring, knocking over the child-size popcorn of some little kid, who starts to cry. The pink-pigtailed girl knows something crazy is going on, but she doesn’t yet understand it has anything to do with her. Not until Alana has grabbed Tyler by his black button-down shirt and pushed him hard into the Icee machine, which begins to stream cherry-red Icee onto the counter.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“where there is no fear, there is no bravery.” As”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“IT MIGHT SEEM WEIRD TO hate parties. Who hates parties? It’s just a bunch of people getting together to have a good time, right? Wrong. It’s a bunch of people getting together to be drunk, loud assholes, with a special emphasis on the loud. And another emphasis on the drunk. And a third emphasis on assholes, while we’re at it. Jamie”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“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, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“Paris? People always say Paris is the shit. “Yes, I’ve never understood the American obsession with that city. The food is actually quite terrible on the whole, and the people can be rather awful if you don’t speak the language.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
“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. I”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from Thanks for the Trouble
Tommy Wallach
Born place: in Stamford, CT, The United States
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“But then, people usually do miss what's right in front of them.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician
“In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.”
― Luc Ferry, quote from A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living
“The path taken by the authorities in their so-called Rauschgiftbekämpfung, or “war on drugs,” lay less in an intensification of the opium law, which was simply adopted from the Weimar Republic,21 than in several new regulations that served the central National Socialist idea of “racial hygiene.” The term Droge—drug—which at one point meant nothing more than “dried plant parts,”* was given negative connotations. Drug consumption was stigmatized and—with the help of quickly established new divisions of the criminal police—severely penalized. This new emphasis came into force as early as November 1933, when the Reichstag passed a law that allowed the imprisonment of addicts in a closed institution for up to two years, although that period of confinement could be extended indefinitely by legal decree.22”
― quote from Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
“Saudades, só portugueses
Conseguem senti-las bem.
Porque têm essa palavra
Para dizer que as têm.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Poems of Fernando Pessoa
“Frankly, I had no idea how anyone knew if they were in love in the first place. Was there ever a single thread a person could pick out from the knot and say “Yes—I am in love—here’s the proof!” or was it always caught up in a wretched tangle of ifs and buts and maybes?”
― Margaret Rogerson, quote from An Enchantment of Ravens
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