The Reasons I Won't Be Coming (2005) (edit title/settings)

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• “We never completely lose our childhood appetites, we just add to the and, in doing so, they become a little less conspicuous.”

• “It was one of those things you come across by chance and though you are, at that moment, unable to grasp it fully or in context, still you are unable to turn away, fascinated by what it means, by what it is going to do to you.”

• “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.”

• “What was I hoping for? What do we ever hope for and isn’t it fortunate how innocent we are in hoping for it? Sunlight suddenly hits the earth, warming it till something grows, something we had not thought about, had not thought possible but now see and see it to be beautiful. The weather is unexpectedly balmy. We quicken our step and the smallest thing excites us.”

• “There is some kind of code or etiquette for sleeping with someone for the first time but it is constantly changing and I never knew it in the first place. Do you keep any clothes on, even if only for a little while? Can the temperature of the room be taken into account? If you disrobe too quickly does it look presumptuous or crassly eager? You have to feign at least a little surprise at being in this position with someone when you’ve never known them this way before. On the other hand, you have to behave as if you’re under the influence of the other person’s body with an insatiable hunger to know their soft and hidden parts, as though this person was the apotheosis of everyone you had ever lusted after.”

• “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.”

• “I have every confidence that loneliness will one day be recognised for what it is, a pathology. Whether it will be psychiatrists, neuro-pathologists or even philosophers who discover this I can’t say, but in the same way that it is now thought that various types of depression have something to do with the presence or absence of serotonin in the brain, so loneliness will one day be correlated with the absence of something other than people. It is possible to be lonely in a crowd at a party, in a marriage and, of course, by yourself. Clearly, other people have almost nothing to do with it. Loneliness is an illness.”

• “In a genuine tragedy there is no hero to die finally but the stage itself falls apart, beginning at the edges.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Have I ever loved you? Yes, before there was reason, and still later, when there was none, even though, as it turned out, the best thing about us was the person I would have become had you been as I had cast you.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Israel
• Russia
• Islington
• Melbourne
• Australia
• Rome
• Moscow
• Soviet Union
• Stalin
• Hong Kong

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Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Elliot Perlman (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• The Age Short Story Award (1994)

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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