Ron Perlman > Quotes

“Death is a thief, the grandest perpetrator of larceny of all. It robs the potential of all the things left undone and reimburses the living with bits of memories that, with each day, pass through the fingers like a handful of sand.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Fuck waiting for the world to change you; you start by trying to change it. And if you are pure of heart and your intentions are good, you can’t lose. Even if nothing happens, you can’t lose.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Depression goes through stages, but if left unchecked and not treated, this elevator ride will eventually go all the way to the bottom floor. And finally you find yourself bereft of choices, unable to figure out a way up or out, and pretty soon one overarching impulse begins winning the battle for your mind: “Kill yourself.” And once you get over the shock of those words in your head, the horror of it, it begins to start sounding appealing, even possessing a strange resolve, logic. In fact, it’s the only thing you have left that is logical. It becomes the only road to relief. As if just the planning of it provides the first solace you’ve felt that you can remember. And you become comfortable with it. You begin to plan it and contemplate the details of how best to do it, as if you were planning travel arrangements for a vacation. You just have to get out. O-U-T. You see the white space behind the letter O? You just want to crawl through that O and be out of this inescapable hurt that is this thing they call clinical depression. “How am I going to do this?” becomes the only tape playing. And if you are really, really, really depressed and you’re really there, you’re gonna find a way. I found a way. I had a way. And I did it. I made sure Opal was out of the house and on a business trip. My planning took a few weeks. I knew exactly how I was going to do it: I didn’t want to make too much of a mess. There was gonna be no blood, no drama. There was just going to be, “Now you see me, now you don’t.” That’s what it was going to be. So I did it. And it was over. Or so I thought. About twenty-four hours later I woke up. I was groggy; zoned out to the point at which I couldn’t put a sentence together for the next couple of days. But I was semifunctional, and as these drugs and shit that I took began to wear off slowly but surely, I realized, “Okay, I fucked up. I didn’t make it.” I thought I did all the right stuff, left no room for error, but something happened. And this perfect, flawless plan was thwarted. As if some force rebuked me and said, “Not yet. You’re not going anywhere.” The only reason I could have made it, after the amount of pills and alcohol and shit I took, was that somebody or something decided it wasn’t my time. It certainly wasn’t me making that call. It was something external. And when you’re infused with the presence of this positive external force, which is so much greater than all of your efforts to the contrary, that’s about as empowering a moment as you can have in your life. These days we have a plethora of drugs one can take to ameliorate the intensity of this lack of hope, lack of direction, lack of choice. So fuck it and don’t be embarrassed or feel like you can handle it yourself, because lemme tell ya something: you can’t. Get fuckin’ help. The negative demon is strong, and you may not be as fortunate as I was. My brother wasn’t. For me, despair eventually gave way to resolve, and resolve gave way to hope, and hope gave way to “Holy shit. I feel better than I’ve ever felt right now.” Having actually gone right up to the white light, looked right at it, and some force in the universe turned me around, I found, with apologies to Mr. Dylan, my direction home. I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt. I’m not exaggerating when I say for the next six months I felt like Superman. Like I’m gonna fucking go through walls. That’s how strong I felt. I had this positive force in me. I was saved. I was protected. I was like the only guy who survived and walked away from a major plane crash. I was here to do something big. What started as the darkest moment in my life became this surge of focus, direction, energy, and empowerment.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“blessed are the storytellers, because they can bridge oceans, marshal great forces, inspire and instruct, transcend all limits, transform hearts and minds. They can break down barriers and be the common thread for disparate humanities, reaching across distant borders.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“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, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“there is no life free of pain, loss, despair, confusion, violence, and, yes, even death. To make it a goal to think you could ever live a life that avoided all these things is pure folly, and you can only fall short. What there is, however, is the ability to manage one’s way through these things so that, in addressing them, you remain as whole as possible, as present as possible, as undaunted as possible. For that is the closest you are ever gonna get to real, real contentment.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“I realized you don’t need to belong to any fuckin’ edifice or ascribe to any dogma to have a relationship with God, to be a good person. You just have to be a good person.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“War, war never changes.”
― Ron Perlman

“We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects.” In writing this line I meant to say that we must not simply “accept” imperfection when it is revealed to us—we must celebrate it. This, I assure you, is the true sign of friendship.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“very rarely does change come in the form you imagined it would. When you’re in the cocoon you never know what kind of butterfly is gonna come flying out.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Once the real you emerges and appears unfettered, naked, and completely in touch with the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you really meet yourself. Then all those things take on a different perspective as well.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“The things that are celebrated as human decency, true heroism, true self-sacrifice, and with a kind of leadership that was completely iconoclastic during the first half of the twentieth century are nearly forgotten. All of a sudden we started looking inward and becoming obsessed with behavior, idiosyncrasies, human flaws, and all this stuff. Some great accomplishments happened in the second half of the twentieth century, don’t get me wrong, but in the process we lost a template of what truly being human looks like.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Literature is nothing more than the expansion of storytelling. Storytelling is obviously the impulse to chronicle something you’ve been through in order to give it its due, to have a catharsis.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Don’t say a word unless that word is worth saying, and if that word is worth saying, say it beautifully. I learned that from Sean Connery.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“the pace at which Sean Connery speaks stems from a decision he’s made. And every single vowel delivered is with respect for the language. But he delivers it so naturally and with so much humanity that you don’t realize that, technically, he is giving a master class in how to deliver a line.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“I like being this guy who says we're all in this together. I've gone right up to the top and said, "You might be the producer, the guy with all the money, but treat people with respect goddammit, because if you don't, you're going to hear from me. We're all equal here, from the lowliest guy to the filmmaker. We are all trying to bring our A-game here, so don't fuck with people.”
― Ron Perlman

“Maybe no matter how [f**ed] up a thing is in your life, the notion of changing it, of letting it go, is obviously way scarier than living with it.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“and then once you put yourself there in that hopeless place, what are your options? Say you lose everything—the house, the school for the kids, the ability to interface with what had been your lifelines—what do you do? And whuddya know, I came up with something! I saw myself as a teacher at NYU or some noble institution for the arts, back in New York City, living in a two-bedroom in what-the-fuck-ever neighborhood we could afford on a teacher’s pay. And it was good, it was fine. Life went on. And it was a good life. And suddenly calm washed over me, almost as if to make me fearless. Because I just dealt with the worst-case scenario and came out the other side unscathed, with everything intact. And I even had some amazing memories of all the glory days I had in showbiz. I was smiling. Fuck, I was happy. And the energy changed. All of a sudden I was giving off a different brand of pheromones. Calmness replaced anxiety. My worst fears had been addressed, and I still had everything that matters, and then some. And sure enough, a funny thing happened”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“Christian Slater, who is the son of another old friend, Mary Jo Slater, a casting director I had known in New York since the beginning.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way

“A lot of people say, “Well, he was 007. He’s no big thing as an actor.” Fuck that shit. He is a fucking master. He is good as anybody I’d ever seen. In fact, it’s always the ones who look so incredibly natural who are constantly being accused of not acting; those are the ones who are the most sublime of professionals.”
― Ron Perlman, Easy Street: The Hard Way