Tom Perrotta

“Things change all the time - abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.”

“It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.”

“Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.”

“Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.”

“Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over Spongebob's body...During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and Spongebob's body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?”

“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.”

“Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer — that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.”

“He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.”

“Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.”

“There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.”

“But he thought about him a lot in the years that followed, whenever anyone made a fag joke or said that gay men deserved to get AIDS. Sometimes, if the circumstances were right, Tim would challenge the speaker, ask if he- in Tim´s experience, it was always a he- had any friends who were gay. Almost always the guy would say no.“Wait till you do” Tim would tell him. “That´s when you´ll realize what an asshole you used to be.”

“I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there’s always another perspective.”

“Except for a small strip of shin that poked out from between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants, his legs were purely theoretical.”

“I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them. I doubt I'll be lying on my deathbed in forty or fifty years, congratulating myself on the fact that I never had sex in an airplane with a handsome Italian businessman, or patting myself on the back for all those years of involuntary celibacy I endured after my divorce. If recent experience is any guide, I'll probably be lying in that hospital bed with my body full of tubes, sneaking glances at the handsome young doctor, wishing that I hadn't been such a coward. Wishing I'd taken more risks, made more mistakes, and accumulated more regrets. Just wishing I'd lived when I had the chance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.”

“Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.”

“From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.”

“Randall kept his eyes glued to the computer screen as she approached. A stranger might have mistaken him for a dedicated Information Sciences professional getting an early start on some important research, but Ruth knew that he was actually scouring eBay for vintage Hasbro action figures…”

“Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory," Gregory said, "It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.”

“Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that the best days had come and gone without her even realizing it.”

“You talk to them. And look at their faces. Cows have very expressive faces."I knew her well enough at that point not to be surprised by this. The first few months we'd worked together, I'd found her distant and intimidating, not just because she was Professor Preston's girlfriend, but also because she'd cultivated a very adult reserve that made her seem years older than the rest of us. She was all business at our editorial-board meetings, holding herself conspicuously aloof from the atmosphere of manic jocularity that dominated the proceedings. The more time we spent together, though, the more I'd come to realize that her reserve was rooted as much in shyness as in confidence, and that her quiet sophistication masked a powerful streak of girlish sincerity.”

“On the first day of Human Sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date---not that she was going on a lot of dates these days---let alone to work. ”

“All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.”