Elliot Perlman Quotes

• 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

  Character, Thinking, Personality

  46 Copy quote

• Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.

  Elliot Perlman

  People, Imagination, Feels

  8 Copy quote

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

  Elliot Perlman

  Struggle, Matter, Born

  Elliot Perlman (2012). “The Street Sweeper”, p.169, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Wall, Hair

  8 Copy quote

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

  Elliot Perlman

  Pain, Loss, Special

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Reason, Good Things, Should

  5 Copy quote

• What is it about men that make women so lonely?

  Elliot Perlman

  Relationship, Lonely, Men

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sleep, Water, Wake Up

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Holocaust, Aspiration

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Views, Two

  "Seven Types of Ambiguity". Book by Elliot Perlman, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elliot Perlman

  Memories, Hungry

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elliot Perlman

  Strong, Morning, Coffee

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Adults, Used

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Thinking, People

  Elliot Perlman (1999). “The Reasons I Won't be Coming: Stories”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Confused, Light, Car

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Children, Motivation

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Talking, Names, Australia

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Trying, Reason, Enough

  Elliot Perlman (1999). “The Reasons I Won't be Coming: Stories”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Perfect, Comfort

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Contentment, Age, Trying

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elliot Perlman

  Use, Weapons, Way

  4 Copy quote

• Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality.

  Elliot Perlman

  Writing, Night, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Crazy, Needs

  4 Copy quote

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