Elliot Perlman Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

What is it about men that make women so lonely?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.

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.