Tom Perrotta quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tom Perrotta on Wise Famous Quotes.

It was a good day for a parade, sunny and unseasonably warm, the sky a Sunday school cartoon of heaven.

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

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

The cause of what they called the "Sudden Departure" remained unknown,

We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.

Your poor lungs." "We're not gonna live long enough to get cancer. The Bible says there's just seven years of Tribulation after the Rapture.

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

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

He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

Blissfully unaware of the beautiful tradition they'd been chosen to uphold.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

these leftover memories

NO SHOES? WE LOVE YOU!

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

It had expanded in a nice, welcoming way, becoming ever rounder and softer without losing its essential shapeliness

Something that had possibly caused the distance between us, but might also bring us back together.

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

We don't smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith.

I've matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.

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 used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'

As if adult males were completely self-sufficient beings, as if a penis and a five o'clock shadow were all they would ever need to get by.

My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.

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

The world she'd been raised to live in no longer existed.

I'm only human, she told herself. There's not enough room in my heart for everyone.

When your words are futile, you're better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.

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

These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

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

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.

It's a matter of dignity," the Chief explained. "At a certain point, that's all you have left.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

She wasn't a tragic widow, after all, just another woman betrayed by a selfish man. It was a smaller, more familiar role, and a lot easier to play.

Some subjects mixed well with weed, but Chemistry wasn't one of them.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

Just a dark shape against an even darker background.

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

It was like traveling back in time, meeting the person you used to be, and recognizing her as a friend.

A girl from his English class who'd overdosed on sleeping pills after learning of the disappearance of her identical twin.

Oddly emphatic, as if she'd been waiting all day for a chance to discuss the weather.

There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. (67)

Kissing her just then felt perfectly normal and completely self-explanatory, the only possible course of action.

It's like the Stone Age over there, just sand and rubble and IEDs.

There was no dignified way to answer a question about your underwear.

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.

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head.