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Top Tom Perrotta Quotes

Browse top 56 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Tom Perrotta.

Favorite Tom Perrotta Quotes

1. "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
2. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
3. "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
4. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
5. "To this day, she's still sad. Because there's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I'm just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn't hurt me at all." ~ Tom Perrotta
6. "Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them - not at all - but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos...After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain." ~ Tom Perrotta
7. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
8. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
9. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
10. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
11. "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?" ~ Tom Perrotta
12. "it had expanded in a nice, welcoming way, becoming ever rounder and softer without losing its essential shapeliness" ~ Tom Perrotta
13. "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
14. "It was a good day for a parade, sunny and unseasonably warm, the sky a Sunday school cartoon of heaven." ~ Tom Perrotta
15. "They were good listeners, worldly yet easily shocked, hungry for details, curious and nonjudgmental at the same time, always happy to give advice, but only if it was requested." ~ Tom Perrotta
16. "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
17. "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…" ~ Tom Perrotta
18. "Sharon had moved to Springdale in November of our senior year. She just appeared out of nowhere in four of my classes…I couldn't stop staring at her. I had this weird feeling she was going to be important." ~ Tom Perrotta
19. "On reflection, though, it struck her as dishonest, like serving people ice cream on their first night at the fat farm. Hey, have some more hot fudge! You're gonna love it here at Camp Lose-a-Lot!" ~ Tom Perrotta
20. "Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while." ~ Tom Perrotta
21. "She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good." ~ Tom Perrotta
22. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
23. "As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama." ~ Tom Perrotta
24. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
25. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
26. "I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love." ~ Tom Perrotta
27. "I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut." ~ Tom Perrotta
28. "I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven." ~ Tom Perrotta
29. "I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle." ~ Tom Perrotta
30. "I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'" ~ Tom Perrotta
31. "I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade." ~ Tom Perrotta
32. "It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs." ~ Tom Perrotta
33. "My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life." ~ Tom Perrotta
34. "A screenwriter heard me read from my novel 'The Wishbones' when it was still in progress and mentioned me to some producers in Hollywood. They called, and I told them I had a novel in my drawer about a high school election that goes haywire. They asked to take a look, and my life changed pretty dramatically as a result." ~ Tom Perrotta
35. "I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them." ~ Tom Perrotta
36. "I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel." ~ Tom Perrotta
37. "I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action." ~ Tom Perrotta
38. "My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them." ~ Tom Perrotta
39. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
40. "It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness." ~ Tom Perrotta
41. "Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish." ~ Tom Perrotta
42. "There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. (67)" ~ Tom Perrotta
43. "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
44. "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. (341)" ~ Tom Perrotta
45. "If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst." ~ Tom Perrotta
46. "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
47. "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
48. "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." ~ Tom Perrotta
49. "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
50. "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
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I like to look at the glass half full."
Author: Abdallah II Of Jordan

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Thin
Ring
Ear
She
Per
Here
Wit
Act
Hen
Thou
Hey
Lit
Use
Tan
Self
Ally
End
Year
Though
Son
Pen
Small
Die
Ten
Kid
Old
Cause
Win
Mad
Los
Sin
Seem
Read
Call
Novel
Able
High
Ask
Drama
Adult
Con
Early
Bit
Rest
Action
Line
King
Ears
Rent
Side

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