Elliot Perlman Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can. He imagines calling you or running into you by chance. Depending on the weather, he imagines you in one of those cotton dresses of yours with flowers on it or in faded blue jeans and a thick woollen button-up cardigan over a checkered shirt, drinking coffee from a mug, looking through your tortoiseshell glasses at a book of poetry while it rains. He thinks of you with your hair tied back and the characteristic sweet scent on your neck. He imagines you this way when he is on the train, in the supermarket, at his parents' house, at night, alone, and when he is with a woman.

He is wrong, though. You didn't read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry, but you didn't. If pressed, he confesses to an imprecise recollection of what it was you read and, anyway, it wasn't your reading that started this. It was the laughter, 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 telephone calls, the in-jokes, the instant music, the sunlight you carried with you, the way he felt when you spoke to his parents, the introductory undergraduate courses, the inevitability of your success, the beach houses, ... ~ 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

We too often laughed at the same time to be a whore and a lonely guy. ~ Elliot Perlman

Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

[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

... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If there are any curses left in baseball, they are all on the north side of Chicago. ~ Tucker Elliot

There is something that pretends to be christianity which is mostly mood. The measure of its faith is merely the measure of its feeling. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Jesus loved the will of His Father. He embraced the limitations, the necessities, the conditions, the very chains of His humanity as He walked and worked here on earth, fulfilling moment by moment His divine commission and the stern demands of His incarnation. Never was there a word or even a look of complaint. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation. ~ Walter Elliot

We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone. ~ Elliot Aronson

I love to work with young kids. ~ Itzhak Perlman

A wedding is a celebration of marriage, of an institution ordained by God at the creation of man, to be entered into with solemnity as well as with joy. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Having the baby changed my life a lot. I don't want to go on the road. ~ Cass Elliot

Another thing that I don't like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don't pick up a violin at all. ~ Itzhak Perlman

There's almost nothing worse than spending an entire day anticipating watching a Yankees vs. Red Sox game, only to have the score be 9-0 in the third inning. ~ Tucker Elliot

She stood, as it were, with her face to God and her back to the people, waiting to receive His word for the 'chose people.' She had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

And then came, perhaps, the biggest offseason move in franchise history … and no, we're not talking about inviting Carlos Peña to camp or hiring Joe Maddon or appointing Andrew Friedman as Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations - those moves had already transpired. No, we're talking about the really big move. After 2007 the Tampa Bay Devil Rays officially released the 'Devil' and emerged in 2008 as the Tampa Bay Rays. ~ Tucker Elliot

I love to continue to challenge myself and put myself in situations that are slightly uncomfortable. ~ Ron Perlman

The world changed on 9/11, but it didn't give a damn what we lost or how much we hurt. It didn't stop spinning. It would go on, one way or another, and it was up to us to hold on to something, anything ... no matter how inconsequential or thin it had felt in the past. ~ Tucker Elliot

Although this is a reasonable use for massage, people with an achieving rigid structure must, because of their pattern, see it as the only reason. Ironically, this particular structure of rigidity rejects any good feeling or pleasure that does not come from their own actions ~ Elliot Greene

St. Augustine said, "The very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties." There are times when the entire arrangement of our existence is disrupted and we long then for just one ordinary day - seeing our ordinary life as greatly desirable, even wonderful, in the light of the terrible disruption that has taken place. Difficulty opens our eyes to pleasures we had taken for granted. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Some of God's greatest mercies are in his refusals. He says no in order that he may, in some way we cannot imagine, say yes. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

God deliver me from the dread asbestos of "other things." Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be aflame. ~ Jim Elliot

I don't tweet or do any other social media, so I don't know what's being said out there. ~ Jane Elliot

There is a right and a wrong in the universe, and the distinction between the two is not that difficult to make. ~ Elliot S! Maggin

We have inadvertently designed a system in which being good at what you do as a teacher is not formally rewarded, while being poor at what you do is seldom corrected nor penalized. ~ Elliot W. Eisner

Choices will continually be necessary and
let us not forget
possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

It seems disrespectful to me to see ladies in church in very short skirts or skimpy, sleeveless tops. I would imagine that it could be distracting to men who are trying to keep their minds on God. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They'll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring. ~ Tucker Elliot

I wish I was like them," I told Tuck as we watched Alix and Rashida sharpen their swords. Their bodies moved in rhythm, one girl beginning a motion that the other completed. "Women who are lovers aren't looked at with revulsion."
"Women are seen as less than men. That's why they're permitted indulgences - they're pretty pets. Is that so much better? ~ Elliot Wake

It can be a huge help to parents considering the adoption of an older child, when college is just a few years away, to know that there are post-adoption resources and specific financial assistance opportunities available to them. ~ Rhea Perlman

If you take being a father seriously, you'll know that you're not big enough for the job, not by yourself ... Being a father will put you on your knees if nothing else ever did. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for you ~ Elisabeth Elliot

'Billy Elliot' prides itself on being a family show, and it made sense to specifically cater to a family audience with an earlier evening curtain time. ~ Eric Fellner

When a wisp of fog blew by her she laughed and reached out her hands to it. When the wind blew she turned to it and opened her bodice, letting it caress and kiss her breasts, for she never knew when it might be him, and still she wanted nothing more than to please him utterly. ~ Elliot Mabeuse

What is it going to be like this time?' I slide his glasses off, setting them on one of the empty shelves.

Elliot kisses a slow path up my neck "It's going to be what we wanted before."

"Thanksgiving on the floor in our underwear?"

He growls out a little laugh, pressing his hips forward when I reach down, lowering his zipper.

"And you in my bed, every night. ~ Christina Lauren

In summer, my Sundays are often taken up with cricket. I play with a bunch of other over-competitive and overenthusiastic guys who I have known for a very long time. ~ Ben Elliot

Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

No matter what line of work you do, success cannot truly be achieved until you own who you are. The most offensive liability then becomes an asset. It makes you perform your best, regardless of the challenges you might face. ~ Ron Perlman

The bathroom has a small tub and no shower, just a smooth hose attached to the faucet and hanging limply downward, a neck bent in defeat.

"You don't have a shower," I say, walking back out and feeling the sudden intimacy of being in his space. It's all so quintessentially him: sparse furniture other than floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with books.

Elliot watches me as I lean against the hallway wall. The space is tiny, and he seems to fill it with his height and the solid width of his chest.

"I don't know if I could handle only having a bathtub," I babble.

"I call it a shath," he says.

"That sounds dirty."

I'm staring at his chest but hear the smile in his voice: "I think that's why I call it that. ~ Christina Lauren

The idea that the Tony committee and the New York theater community as a whole have embraced 'Billy Elliot' is very, very exciting. ~ Eric Fellner

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves. ~ Itzhak Perlman

J.D.: Elliot, I'm thirty years old; I'm single, I'm homeless, and I'm pretty sure I just soiled myself.
Elliot: Why don't you just move into my place?
J.D.: Oh, great, then we'll be two losers under one roof. ~ Bill Lawrence

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I'd taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he'd invite me back as a guest lecturer. He'd probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn't work, but whatever. ~ Tucker Elliot

It's much easier to remember the World Series heroics of Tony Pérez, Pete Rose, and Joe Morgan than it is to recall who set the table for Rose during Game 7 of the 1975 World Series vs. Boston. The Red Sox led 3-2 in the seventh when [Ken] Griffey drew a free pass. Not nearly as memorable as the home run Pérez hit against Bill Lee that made it a 3-2 ballgame, not nearly as memorable as the hit Rose got to tie the game, and for sure not as memorable as the hit Morgan got to win it in the ninth, but … it's a shame people forget Griffey stole second base with two outs to get into scoring position. ~ Tucker Elliot

I have one desire now - to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it. ~ Elisabeth Elliot