Jonathan Tropper · 339 pages
Rating: (117.7K votes)
“You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“You're terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being
angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning
yourself without thinking about it.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she'll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She'll throw temper tantrums, she'll need speech therapy, she'll grow breasts and have pimples, she'll fight with her parents, she'll worry about her weight, she'll put out, she'll have her heart broken, she'll be happy, she'll be lonely, she'll be complicated, she'll be confused, she'll be depressed, she'll fall in love and get married, and she'll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beautiful.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I’m living in separate universes, and I have no idea where I actually belong.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“...you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I wasted a lot of time being angry, time I can't get back. And now I see you, so angry about what happened to your marriage, and I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“A good speech is like a woman's skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
“I blame Hollywood for skewing perspectives. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily ever-after is a forgone conclusion.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You
Jonathan Tropper
Born place: in The United States
Born date February 19, 1970
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“I know this feeling. It's a familiar one. The feeling of knowing that everything has changed, and you have to keep going, but you don't know what to do.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin
“Isabelle's moods began to vary with alarming speed. She wondered if she had always been this way and simply failed to notice. No. Good heavens, you noticed something like this: driving to the A&P feeling collected and cozy, as though your clothes fit around you exactly right, and by the time you drove home feeling completely undone, because as you walked across the parking lot the smell of the grocery bag you held in your arms mingled with the smell of spring and produced some scrape of longing in your heart. Frankly, it was exhausting. Because for all those moments of hope that God was near, of some bursting, some widening seeming to take place in her heart, Isabelle had other moments that could only be described as rage. (117)”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Amy and Isabelle
“When is truth pleasing? It is only when we clothe it's nakedness with rags of imagination, or sweeten it with fiction, that it can please.”
― H. Rider Haggard, quote from Dawn
“These people you let escape? They smashed the front windows of the Jessica McClintock store and were caught defacing the mannequins. How do I explain this to the other mall residents? This makes it look like we don’t have control.” “You don’t have control.” Marco wondered why this was such a revelation. “If we don’t provide the illusion of control, we’ll have anarchy. Your job is to help me project this illusion. And if you can no longer manage your job, I am going to have to relieve you of your card key and all privileges of non-compliance that up until now you have enjoyed.”
― Dayna Lorentz, quote from No Easy Way Out
“The spiritual efficacy of all encounters is determined by the amount of personal ego that is in play. If two people meet and disagree fiercely about theological matters but agree, silently or otherwise, that God’s love creates and sustains human love, and that whatever else may be said of God is subsidiary to this truth, then even out of what seems great friction there may emerge a peace that—though it may not end the dispute, though neither party may be “convinced” of the other’s position—nevertheless enters and nourishes one’s notion of, and relationship with, God. Without this radical openness, all arguments about God are not simply pointless but pernicious, for each person is in thrall to some lesser conception of ultimate truth and asserts not love but a lesson, not God but himself.”
― Christian Wiman, quote from My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
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