Elliot Perlman Quotes

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

Once you fall for someone, their smell can be a powerful thing. Women will wear their boyfriends' T-shirts, and throughout tales in history men have held on to their lover's handkerchief.

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

I suppose that there are many novels that are set during the summer because it's a lonely time of year. Friends come and go, comfort comes and goes, which makes it a perfect time of year to indulge in melancholia.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

I left parts of myself everywhere, The way absent-minded people leave Gloves and umbrellas Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck

When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone.

When I am sad and wearyWhen I think all hope has goneWhen I walk along High HolbornI think of you with nothing on

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you.

Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowoah doowoah.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.

It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.

Nostalgia is a way of remembering people and places and things, and wishing things hadn't changed. It has a sweetness to it. Sadness is just--well--being sad.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

For me, it's always a little sad getting out of bed. Every morning after I get up, I always gaze longingly at my bed and lament, 'You were wonderful last night. I didn't want it to end. I can't wait to see you again.

Do you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks. "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do." "What way might that be?" "As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me." " I am not afraid of you," Marco says.

I felt more alone that week than any. Sometimes I'd feel a body lying next to me like an amputee feels a phantom limb. All I did was think about Jennie Gerhardt and Alice Quinn and all the decades of people I had known. The more I thought, the more I felt like crying. Life seemed so sweet and so sad, and so hard to let go of in the end. But hey, man, every day is a brand new deal, right? Just keep on working and something's bound to turn up.

Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, oh sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.