Elliot Perlman Quotes

“What is it about men that make women so lonely?”

— Elliot Perlman

“You know you're in love with somebody when you wake up next to them, comfortable despite your breath smelling like the week-old water at the bottom of a vase, when you are terribly excited to see them, to talk to them again, having missed them after all that sleep.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused”

— Elliot Perlman

It's like the smell of burned toast. You made the toast. You looked forward to it. You even enjoyed making it, but it burned. What were you doing? Was it your fault? It doesn't matter anymore. You open the window, but only the very top layer of the smell goes away. The rest remains around you. It's the walls. You leave the room, but it's on your clothes. You change your clothes, but it's in your hair. It's on the thin skin on the tops of your hand. And in the morning, it's still there.

— Elliot Perlman

“There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives.”

— Elliot Perlman

You were trying to tell me something and I was trying to tell you something else. We didn't trust each other and that was reason enough to make each of us right.

— Elliot Perlman

“He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others”

— Elliot Perlman

“I asked her where she got her toughness. She pretended she didn't understand. Maybe she didn't at first, or maybe she had forgotten that to do the things she was prepared to do, to have them done to her, took enormous toughness, more than most people had. She said you just had to keep working on yourself until you didn't feel what they wanted you to feel, or anything else. By seven o'clock she had fallen asleep in my arms having said that she loved me and that she knew I was going through hell. She breathed like a little girl.”

— Elliot Perlman

“What else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone?”

— Elliot Perlman

“[Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.”

— Elliot Perlman

“You would love the way he sees you. He uses you as a weapon against himself and not merely because you did”

— Elliot Perlman

“I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.”

— Elliot Perlman

“I hold him to my chest. My love for him is the only unequivocally good thing I know is always there inside of me. It is the reason I should be spared all that is coming, the only reason.”

— Elliot Perlman

“You don't need to be seeing someone to be in love with her. You can have lost touch with her, she can have hurt you, even inexplicably. If you ever felt that you really knew her and that it was what you knew that you loved, and if you remember what it was you once knew, why is it so crazy to retain that love still?”

— Elliot Perlman

“He uses you as a weapon against himself and not merely because you did. He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others. He thinks of you when the woman lying next to him thinks he's asleep.”

— Elliot Perlman

The peculiar striations that define someone's personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.

— Elliot Perlman

“Charisma will sustain a relationship only in the way that strong coffee first thing in the morning will sustain a career.”

— Elliot Perlman

“... anyway it wasn't your reading that started this. It was the laugher, the carefree laughter, the three dimensional Coca Cola advertisement that you were, the try-anything-once friends, the imperviousness to all that came before you, the chain phone calls, the in-jokes, the instant success, the beach houses, the white lace underwear, the private dancing, the good-graced acceptance pf part-time shift work, the apparent absence of expectations, the ever-changing disposable cults of the rural, the family, the eastern, the modern, the postmodern, the impoverished, the sleekly deregulated, the orgasm, the feminine, the feminist, and then the way you canceled with the air of one making a salad”

— Elliot Perlman

“Simon and I by then were practicing to be apart, rehearsing together in the same room and often in the same conversation.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Listen- all that she was then, all that she is now, those gestures, everything I remember but won't or can't articulate anymore, the perfect words that are somehow made imperfect when used to describe her and all that should remain unsaid about her- it is all unsupported by reason. I know that. But that enigmatic calm that attaches itself to people in the presence of reason- it's something from which I haven't been able to take comfort, not reliably, not since her.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.”

— Elliot Perlman

“We too often laughed at the same time to be a whore and a lonely guy.”

— Elliot Perlman

“The reason his father has no time for poetry is that he is afraid of the messiness of life. Poetry feeds on all that spills over the boundaries of the usual things, the everyday things with which most people are obsessed, so William has no time for it.”

— Elliot Perlman

“[T]he best historians ... take a thorough knowledge of the evidence of their subject and combine it with a sharp intellect, the warmest understanding of people and the highest imaginative powers.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Everyone was always hungry. The poorer you were, the hungrier you were, and with the hunger came weakness and irritability. It became difficult to think clearly and you needed to think clearly to work out how to survive the next day, how to get food. You were sure you could still work if you could find work, and you could look for it if only you could eat. But how were you going to get food, for yourself, for your children, for your wife or husband, for your parents? There were simply too many people within those walls for the calories that were let in. How were you to get food when there just wasn't enough of it? What were you going to have to do? With hunger of this severity came fatigue, a weakness that transcended tiredness and permeated your sinews and bones. As your limbs got ever lighter, they felt progressively heavier with each new day.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same and no one know how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines you choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.”

— Elliot Perlman

Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all of its own that you can never know. It can capture, corner you or liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile.

— Elliot Perlman

“The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse.”

— Elliot Perlman

“I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.”

— Elliot Perlman

“Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.”

— Elliot Perlman

“I'm a Taurus, which sounds like the name of a pickup truck. I'd prefer to be born under the sign of the rock wallaby. If you're going to interpret your life pursuant to an utterly irrational dogma, why can't it have a cute mascot? Rock wallabies really are fabulous animals, and in any remotely just world, they would have their own star sign.”

— Elliot Perlman

Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality. I might have a Scotch to keep me going, but I like to be as awake and as alert as possible.

— Elliot Perlman

“After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.”

— Elliot Perlman

“I'll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.”

— Elliot Perlman

“As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.”

— Elliot Perlman

“I know that at literary festivals I'm speaking mostly to middle-class women, who frequently vote in a way that is contrary to how I'd like them to vote.”

— Elliot Perlman

“I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.”

— Elliot Perlman

In my work, I'm always trying not to put barriers up between the 'good poor' and the 'bad poor.' I'm not sure my work will change things much, but at the very least, you want to make people feel that they are not alone.

— Elliot Perlman

“At difficult times of my life, books have been an incredible comfort. When I was 12, I changed schools and my parents split up. It was then that I became addicted to reading. A great writer can attach themselves to your mind and heart, and you feel you understand the world better. As long as you have the capacity to read, you needn't be alone any more. I remember thinking as a child, "If I could give one person the comfort I keep getting from books, then I want to write."”

— Elliot Perlman

“When you're younger, you tend to be reckless about trying to find out who you are and what you can do and should do. But as you get older you become more accepting of yourself, and with that comes greater contentment.”

— Elliot Perlman