Andre Aciman Quotes

This was all in the head. And that's where it stays.

To be happy like this maybe wasn't so difficult after all. All I had to do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the next time.

Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties.

To think that I had almost fallen for the skin of his hands, his chest, his feet that had never touched a rough surface in their existence - and his eyes, which, when their other, kinder gaze fell on you, came like the miracle of the Resurrection. You could never stare long enough but needed to keep staring to find out why you couldn't.

On our way we passed a shop where my mother always ordered flowers. As a child I liked to watch the large storefront window awash in a perpetual curtain of water which came sliding down ever so gently, giving the shop an enchanted, mysterious aura that reminded me of how in many films the screen would blur to announce that a flashback was about to occur.

What did you write on the back of the postcard?"
"It was going to be a surprise."
"I'm too old for surprises. Besides, surprises always come with a sharp edge that is meant to hurt. I don't want to be hurt - not by you. Tell me."
"Just two words."
"Let me guess: If not later, when?"
"Two words, I said. Besides, that would be cruel."
I thought for a while.
"I give up."
"Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I've never said anything truer in my life to anyone.

He saw through everybody, but he saw through them precisely because the first thing he looked for in people was the very thing he had seen in himself and may not have wished others to see.

Resentment not that she had lied, or played me, or let her fantasies run wild for a moment and stir mine, all the better to dash them, but that she had changed her mind - and who could blame her? Resentment because I had given her my trust, and there was no taking trust back.

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)

I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first time, and each time I played it I was sending him a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extra cadenza. Just for him.

We were – and he must have recognized the signs long before I did – flirting.

But no one can prepare for the worst. The worst doesn't only dash hopes; it tears through everything in ways that are almost meant to hurt, to punish, to shame. Despite my most sobering forecasts, life can still play the cruelest card and scuttle everything - and just when I thought we were sailing past the shoals.

Elio: Are you sory I came?

Oliver: I'd holt you and kiss you if I could.

There are easy ways to bring back summer in the snowstorm

It was not flirting, just verbal ping-pong. I was dying to slam the ball but too polite to stop the back-and-forth.

We were too close, I thought, I'd never been so close to him except in a dream or when he cupped his hand to light my cigarette. If he brought his ear any closer he'd hear my heart. I'd seen it written in novels but never believed it until now.

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.

[...]by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they might ever die.

Before long, my mother's friend, who, at the last minute, decided to stay for dinner, was asked to sit where I'd sat at lunch. Oliver's place setting was instantly removed,

The removal was performed summarily, without a hint of regret or compunction, the way you'd remove a bulb that was no longer working, or scrape out the entrails of a butchered sheep, or take off the sheets and blankets from a bed where someone had died. Here, take these, and remove them from sight. I watched his silverware, his place mat, his napkin, his entire being disappear. It presaged exactly what would happen less than a month from now.

Do you really like to read that much?" she asked as we ambled our way casually in the dark toward the piazzetta. I looked at her as if she had asked me if I loved music, or bread and salted butter, or ripe fruit in the summertime. "Don't get me wrong," she said. "I like to read too. But I don't tell anyone." At last, I thought, someone who speaks the truth. I asked her why she didn't tell anyone. "I don't know ... " This was more her way of asking for time to think or to hedge before answering, "People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don't always like who they are." "Do you hide who you are?" "Sometimes. Don't you?" "Do I? I suppose.

When you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember I'm here. Right now, you may not want to feel anything. Maybe you'll never want to feel anything. And, maybe it's not to me you want to speak about these things, but I feel something you obviously did.

Look, you had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you.

In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet. But I am not such a parent. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!

And I'll say one more thing… it'll clear the air. I may have come close, but I never have what you two have. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. Just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once, and before you know it, your heart's worn out. And as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there's sorrow, pain; don't kill it, and with it, the joy you've felt.

..time is always the price we pay for the unlived life.

Occasionally you'll say "Excuse me" when I happen to stand in your way, and "Thank you" when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I'll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts -just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what's called a broken heart.

I wanted him dead too, so that if I couldn't stop thinking about him and worrying about when would be the next time I'd see him, at least his death would put an end to it. I wanted to kill him myself, even, so as to let him know how much his mere existence had come to bother me, how unbearable his ease with everything and everyone, taking all things in stride, his tireless I'm-okay-with-this-and-that, his springing across the gate to the beach when everyone else opened the latch first, to say nothing of his bathings suits, his spot in paradise, his cheeky Later!, his lip-smacking love for apricot juice. If I didn't kill him, then I'd cripple him for life, so that he'd be with us in a wheelchair and never go back to the States. If he were in a wheelchair, I would always know where he was, and he'd be easy to find. I would feel superior to him and become his master, now that he was crippled.

Then it hit me that I could have killed myself instead, or hurt myself badly enough and let him know why I'd done it. If I hurt my face, I'd want him to look at me and wonder why, why might anyone do this to himself, until, years and years later--yes, Later!--he'd finally piece the puzzle together and beat his head against the wall.

It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today. Later!

You lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can't bring yourself to live with the loss. And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same.

Elio: What were you doing?

Oliver: Thinking.

Elio: About?

Oliver: Things. Going back to the States. The courses I have to teach this fall. The book. You.

Elio: Me?

Oliver: Me?

Elio: No one else?

Oliver: No one else. I come here every night and just sit here. Sometimes I spend hours.

Elio: All by yourself? I never knew. I thougt...

Oliver: I know what you thought. This spot is probably what I'll miss the most. I've been happy in B. I was looking out towards there and thinking that in two weeks I'll be back at Columbia.

Elio: All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won't be here. i don't know what I'll do then. At least you'll be elsewhere, where there are no memories.

But I couldn't even remember last night's anxieties. They were completely overshadowed by what followed them and seemed to belong to a segment of time to which I had no access whatsoever.

You know nothing about me. You see me. But you don't see me. Everyone else sees me. And yet no one has the foggiest notion of the gathering storm within me. It's my secret private little hell. I live with it, I sleep with it. I love that no one knows. I wish you knew. Sometimes I fear you do.

How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. 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. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.

Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher.

I did not want passion, I did not want pleasure. Perhaps I didn't even want proof. And I did not want words, small talk, big talk, bike talk, book talk, any of it. Just the sun, the grass, the occasional sea breeze, and the smell of his body fresh from his chest, from his neck and his armpits.

We haven't spoken in ages, and I don't know that we're friends, though I'm sure we will always be. He's always read me extremely well, and I have a feeling that he suspects that if I never write it's not because I don't care but because a part of me still does and always will, just as I know he still cares, which is why he too never writes. And knowing this is good enough for me.

Who can resist sleep at two or three in the afternoon in these sunlit parts of the Mediterranean?

But when I lay in bed and felt uncomfortable, it came back on the double as if to score a point each time I thought I'd felt the last of it. I had known it would hurt. What I hadn't expected was that the hurt would find itself coiled and twisted into sudden pangs of guilt.

His undergraduate years, each time he spoke of them, acquired a limelit, incandescent magic, as if they belonged to another life, a life to which I had no access since it already belonged to the past. Proof of its existence trickled, as it did now, in his ability to mix drinks, or to tell arcane grappas apart, or to speak to all women, or in the mysterious square envelopes addressed to him that arrived at our house from all over the world.

I had never envied him the past, nor felt threatened by it. All these facets of his life had the mysterious character of incidents that had occurred in my father's life long before my birth but which continued to resonate into the present. I didn't envy life before me, nor did I ache to travel back to the time when he had been my age.

I lift the corner of my sheets.

He shakes his head.

Just for a second?

Shakes it again. / know myself, he says.

I'd heard him use these very same words before. They meant I'm dying to, but may not be able to hold back once I start, so I'd rather not start. What aplomb to tell someone you can't touch him because you know yourself.

Perhaps it never went away.

Jewish?"
"Moslem?" I replied.
"Just like a Jew: always answers with a question."
"Just like a Moslem: always answers the wrong question.

"Moslem?" I replied.
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Oliver was Oliver,' I said, as if that summed things up.

'Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi,' my father added, quoting Montaigne's all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.

I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë's words: because 'he's more myself than I am.

I explained that opsizo meant to arrive too late to the feast, or just before last call, or to feast today with the weight of all the wasted yesteryears.

What if my body - just my body, my heart - cried out for his? What to do then?

What if at night I wouldn't be able to live with myself unless I had him by me, inside me? What then?

Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks?

Oliver came up to me and asked me to play something on the piano.

'What would you like?' I asked.

'Anything.'

This would be my thanks for the most beautiful evening of my life. I took a sip from my second martini, feeling as decadent as one of those jazz piano players who smoke a lot and drink a lot and are found dead in a gutter at the end of every film.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the signposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

In years to come, if the book was still in his possession, I wanted him to ache. Better yet, I wanted someone to look through his books one day, open up this tiny volume of Armance, and ask, Tell me who was in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties? And then I'd want him to feel something as darting as sorrow and fiercer than regret, maybe even pity for me, because in the bookstore that morning I'd have taken pity too, if pity was all he had to give, if pity could have made him put an arm around me, and underneath his surge of pity and regret, hovering like a vague, erotic undercurrent that was years in the making, I wanted him to remember the morning on Monet's berm when I'd kissed him not the first but the second time and given him my spit in his mouth because I so desperately wanted his in mine.

We may never speak about this again. But I hope you'll never hold it against me that we did. I will have been a terrible father if, one day, you'd want to speak to me and felt that the door was shut or not sufficiently open.

How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.

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?

And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what's tearing me up.

The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot.

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.

I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.

I didn't know their language, didn't know the language of their hearts, didn't even know my own. I saw veils everywhere: what I wanted, what I didn't know I wanted, what I didn't want to know I wanted, what I'd always known I wanted. This is either a miracle. Or it is hell.

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere
ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends
even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.

I wish I had one friend I wasn't destined to lose.

Oliver, I'm happy,' I said. He looked at me in wonderment. 'You're just horny.

Nonsense. I wanted you from day one. I just hid it better.

(T)here was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn't take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn't. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its clear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.

I have three things: my cab, my zeb, and my dignity. Without one, the other two are worthless.

But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. 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. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.

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.

Find Cupid everywhere in Rome because we'd clipped on of his wings and he was forced to fly in circles.

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot.

And then, as if something were being torn out of my lungs and needed to be said, I finally found a moment when he was alone to tell him. "I've never had friends, you've been my only friend," I said, speaking these words without even realizing I had said them. What I'd meant to say was, I was your friend, I wish you'd stayed mine.

He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. This is the colour of wheat and gold.

I looked at him: I want one more kiss.

I should, could, have seized him.

By the next morning, things became officially chilly.

For me to write, I need to work my way back out of one home, consider another, and find the no-man's-land in between. I need to go to one Andre, unwrite that Andre, choose the other Andre across the way, only then go looking for the middle Andre, whose voice will most likely approximate the voice of an Andre able to camouflage all telltale signs that English is not his mother tongue, but that neither is French, nor Italian, nor Arabic. Writing must almost have to fail - it must almost not succeed. If it goes well from the start, if I am in the groove, if I come home to writing, it's not the writing for me. I need to have lost the key and to find no replacement. Writing is not a homecoming. Writing is an alibi. Writing is a perpetual stammer of alibis.

So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.

It's not death I refuse, but extinction.

Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. this was the sum of everything I'd been in my life
and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name.

And yes, there was such a luster in his eyes that I had to look away, and when I looked back at him, his gaze hadn't moved and was still focused on my face, as if to say, So you looked away and you've come back, will you be looking away again soon? - which was why I had to look away once more, as if immersed in thought, yet all the while scrambling for something to say, the way a fish struggles for water in a muddied pond that's drying up in the heat.

What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we'd met, we'd been thinking along the same lines, and when we feared we weren't or felt we were wrong-footing each other, it was simply because we had learned not to trust that anyone could possibly think and behave the way we did, which was why I was so diffident with him and mistrusted every impulse in myself and couldn't have been happier when I saw how easily we'd shed some of our screens.

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. 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! (p. 225)

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.

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a god, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn't deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn't always respect what we believe is the end of life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished.

The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.

Men!" she finally said, as though that one word summed up all the shortcomings most women are willing to overlook and learn to put up with and ultimately forgive in the men they hope to love for the rest of their lives even when they know they won't

Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi," my father added, quoting Montaigne's all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie. (Because it was he, because it was I)

Wish we could start all over in that room, I said. Both leaning out the window in the evening, rubbing shoulders, as we did in Rome - every day of my life, I said. Every day of mine too. Shirt, toothbrush, score, and I'm flying over, so don't tempt me either.

The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.

But all of these hours were strained by fear, as if fear were a brooding specter, or a strange, lost bird trapped in our little town, whose sooty wing flecked every living thing with a shadow that would never wash. I didn't know what I was afraid of, nor why I worried so much, nor why this thing that could so easily cause panic felt like hope sometimes and, like hope in the darkest moments, brought such joy, unreal joy, joy with a noose tied around it. The thud my heart gave when I saw him unannounced both terrified and thrilled me. I was afraid when he showed up, afraid when he failed to, afraid when he looked at me, more frightened yet when he didn't.

Finally his voice came through. 'Elio,' he said. I could hear my parents and the voices of children in the background. No one could say my name that way. 'Elio,' I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I'd forgotten nothing. 'It's Oliver,' he said. He had forgotten.

In my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.

But then you're a bit like me: some people may be brokenhearted not because they've been hurt but because they've never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them.

This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.

I want to know you, and through you me.

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.

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.

Oliver: Do you have any idea how glad I am that we slept together?

Elio:I don't know.

Oliver: It would be just like you not to know. I just don't want to regret any of it - including what you wouldn't let me talk this morning. I just dread that the thought of having messed you up. I don't want either of us to have to pay one way or another.

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 ...

it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.

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

What's missing in my life?' I was going to say Everything, but corrected myself. 'Friends - the way everyone seems to be fast friends in this place - I wish I had friends like yours, like you.

I could spend the rest of my life like this: with him, at night, in Rome, my eyes totally shut, one leg coiled around his. I thought of coming back here in the weeks or months to come - for this was our spot.

Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it's not with me that you'll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.



Look. You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you.

Your problem is not that you misread signs; all you see are signs.

Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn't care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.

Because it would be very wrong.
"Would"? (I asked).

The thought washed over me like water on a flower shop window, like a soothing, cool lotion after you've showered and spent the whole day in the sun, loving the sun but loving the balsam more.