Top 67 Andre Aciman Quotes
#1. I believe with every cell in my body that every cell in yours must not, must never, die, and if it does have to die, let it die inside my body.
Andre Aciman
#2. He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. This is the colour of wheat and gold.
Andre Aciman
#4. Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.
Andre Aciman
#5. The point of art is not to give you what you already feel comfortable with; that's reporting, not art, that TV, not art, that's magaziney art, not art. Art gives you so personal an interpretation that it compels you to say, This here is more real than what I know is really out there.
Andre Aciman
#6. As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers
Andre Aciman
#7. Because I didn't want to forget was the heart and soul of poetry.
Andre Aciman
#8. He had picked up shrink talk from the women he'd met in Cambridge and understood that once a woman bares her soul there's little else she won't bare ...
Andre Aciman
#9. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.
Andre Aciman
#10. Later that evening in my diary, I wrote: I was exagerrating when I said I thought you hated the piece. What I meant to say was: I thought you hated me. I was hoping you'd persuade me of the opposite - and you did, for a while. Why won't I believe it tomorrow morning?
Andre Aciman
#11. It was not flirting, just verbal ping-pong. I was dying to slam the ball but too polite to stop the back-and-forth.
Andre Aciman
#12. I think everyone is wounded in their sex," I said. "I can't think of one person who isn't.
Andre Aciman
#13. Like Che Guevara, he'd appear wearing his beret, his pointed beard with the drooping mustache, and the cocksure swagger of someone who has just planted dynamite all over Cambridge and couldn't wait to trigger the fuse, but not before coffee and a croissant.
Andre Aciman
#14. I'd heard him tell a woman who complained he never helped her achieve orgasm, that she should treasure the memory of her last orgasm, since it probably predated the French Revolution.
Andre Aciman
#15. I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more ...
Andre Aciman
#16. No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
Andre Aciman
#17. What did I tell you?" Kalaj turned to me without even looking at the owner. "Everyone shuts their door in the end.
Andre Aciman
#18. Tonight the rain feels so meek and muted that brushing it away with a hand might make it stop. It lacks conviction, has lost its vigor. Don't bother with umbrellas, it seems to say. I'm about to stop anyway, my heart's not in it tonight.
Andre Aciman
#19. I'm not sure I want to go ahead with this, but I need to know, and better with you than anyone else. I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.
Andre Aciman
#20. I'm not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together
it doesn't mean I know how to speak about the tings that matter most to me."
"But you're doing it now
in a way."
"Yes, in a way
that's how I always say things: in a way.
Andre Aciman
#21. There is no love without desire, diffidence, defeat.
Andre Aciman
#22. Among Arabs he was a Berber, among Frenchmen an Arab, among his own a nothing, as I'd been a Jew among Arabs, an Egyptian among strangers and now an alien among WASPs, the clueless janitor trying out for the polo team.
Andre Aciman
#23. How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.
Andre Aciman
#24. I have three things: my cab, my zeb, and my dignity. Without one, the other two are worthless.
Andre Aciman
#25. What did one do around here?
Nothing. Wait for summer to end.
What did one do in the winter, then?
I smiled at the answer I was about to give. He got the gist and said, 'Don't tell me: wait for summer to come, right?
Andre Aciman
#26. In my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.
Andre Aciman
#27. Expatriation, like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, try to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities: a person, a place, an event, a moment, etc.
Andre Aciman
#28. People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don't always like who they are.
Andre Aciman
#29. Jewish?"
"Moslem?" I replied.
"Just like a Jew: always answers with a question."
"Just like a Moslem: always answers the wrong question.
Andre Aciman
#30. I was going for the devious smile that would suddenly light up his face each time he'd read my mind, when all I really wanted was skin, just skin.
Andre Aciman
#31. What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.
Andre Aciman
#32. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!
Andre Aciman
#33. You stop belonging to yourself," she said. "I belong to my child, my husband, my home, my work, my babysitter, my cleaning lady. The time that remains, like after-tax dollars, doesn't last longer than a two-minute sonata by Scarlatti."
"And you don't even like Scarlatti," I said.
Andre Aciman
#34. I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn't forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.
Andre Aciman
#35. Just take me and molt me and turn me inside out, till, like a character in Ovid, I become one with your lust, that's what I wanted. Give me a blindfold, hold my hand, and don't ask me to think - will you do that for me?
Andre Aciman
#36. If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.
Andre Aciman
#37. In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn't wait to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I asked him what did it - the opulence, the abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich? "Actually," he said, "it was the ham.
Andre Aciman
#38. Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
Andre Aciman
#39. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.
Andre Aciman
#40. Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I'll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it's time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word ...
Andre Aciman
#41. Does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like and intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell
so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who'll relieve it at night?
Andre Aciman
#42. I looked away, because he was staring at me, and I knew I was flushed, and I knew I'd made a face, though I still wanted him to stare at me even if it embarrassed me, and I wanted to keep staring at him too ...
Andre Aciman
#43. He, of all people, understood all about these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul.
Andre Aciman
#44. Something unexpected seemed to clear away between us, and, for a second, it seemed there was absolutely no difference in age between us, just two men kissing, and even this seemed to dissolve, as I began to feel we were not even two men, just two beings.
Andre Aciman
#45. At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief - or do they hound you till the bitter end?
Andre Aciman
#46. There were people in the world who, for all their gruff arrogance, can, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuade you they are inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable - with unsettling reminders, though, that their ability to flip from one to the other is what ultimately makes them deadly.
Andre Aciman
#48. You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.
Andre Aciman
#49. Let's go now." He extended his hand to help me get up. I grabbed it and, turning on my side facing the wall away from him to prevent him from seeing me, I asked, "Must we?" This was the closest I would ever come to saying, Stay. Just stay with me.
Andre Aciman
#50. I myself was nothing more than a collection of marginal selves who sit out their time like unpaid stevedores on an unfinished pier where no boats ever dock.
Andre Aciman
#52. Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It's the asshole, stupid.
Andre Aciman
#53. We are driven by something as simple and as obvious as the desire to be happy, and, if that fails, by the belief that we once have been.
Andre Aciman
#54. The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.
Andre Aciman
#55. With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.
Andre Aciman
#56. Kalaj would say, "I've got the eyes of a lynx, the memory of an elephant, the instincts of a wolf ... "
" ... and the brain of a tapir," would interrupt his nemesis, the Algerian.
Andre Aciman
#57. If we can't say what we think under our roof, then we have no roof.
Andre Aciman
#58. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.
Andre Aciman
#59. What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest. (p. 109)
Andre Aciman
#60. If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.
Andre Aciman
#61. And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.
Andre Aciman
#62. Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.
Andre Aciman
#63. Shame, which is the reluctance to be who we're not even sure we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us, deeper even than who we are, as though beyond identity were buried reefs and sunken cities teeming with creatures as we couldn't begin to name because they came long before us.
Andre Aciman
#64. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I'm with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.
Andre Aciman
#66. How is it that some people go through hell trying to get close to you, while you haven't the haziest notion and don't even give them a thought when two weeks go by and you haven't so much as exchanged a single word between you? Did he have any idea? Should I let him know?
Andre Aciman
#67. Of course, I feared that the joy I felt, like certain trees, had taken root at the edge of a craggy cliff. They may crane their necks and turn their leaves all they want toward the sun, but gravity has the last word.
Andre Aciman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
