Andre Aciman Quotes

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

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

Oh, but we do age. We don't grow up. ~ Andre Aciman

Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb. ~ Andre Aciman

You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist. Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, He died last night. We missed out on so much. It was a coma. Tomorrow I go back to my coma, and you to yours. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

I desperately wanted to give him something. By contrast, taking seemed so bland, so facile, so mechanical. ~ Andre Aciman

There is no love without desire, diffidence, defeat. ~ Andre Aciman

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

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he'd step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I'd been rehearsing for days now, Please, don't hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

He, of all people, understood all about these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul. ~ Andre Aciman

If we can't say what we think under our roof, then we have no roof. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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

Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you. ~ Andre Aciman

How could anyone intuit the manner of someone's thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking? How could he perceive so many devious turns in others unless he had practiced them himself? ~ Andre Aciman

He hated Egypt and he's buried in Egypt. "What could be worse than being buried in a cemetery where you know nobody, Monsieur Jacques?" he would ask.
"And I tell you what. Worse than dying is the thought that no one will ever come to your grave, that no one will come wash the letters of your name. Everyone remembers for a few months, a few years, on anniversaries, and then, a generation later, they forget you. And the earth might as well make dust of you, for you're as good as unborn - you never were born - even if you live to be a hundred. ~ Andre Aciman

Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don't want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet. ~ Andre Aciman

I like the way you say things. Why are you always putting yourself down? ~ Andre Aciman

It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn't want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well. ~ Andre Aciman

On my way up the staircase, I tried to imagine myself coming down this very same staircase tomorrow morning. By then I might be someone else. Did I even like this someone else whom I didn't yet know and who might not want to say good morning then or have anything to do with me for having brought him to this pass? Or would I remain the exact same person walking up this staircase, with nothing about me changed, and not one of my doubts resolved? ~ Andre Aciman

As I sat there, working on transcriptions at my round table in the morning, what I would have settled for was not his friendship, not anything. Just to look up and find him there, suntan lotion, straw hat, red bathing suit, lemonade. To look up and find you there, Oliver. For the day will come soon enough when I'll look up and you'll no longer be there. ~ Andre Aciman

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

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me
a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for. ~ Andre Aciman

Suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he's spied too many such ships before and doesn't want his hopes dashed again. But ~ Andre Aciman

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

Maybe every other sorrow I'd known in life suddenly decided to converge on this very one. I had to fight it off. And if he didn't see, it's probably because he himself was not immune to it. ~ Andre Aciman

Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I'm with you and we're well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you're with me, Oliver. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

I can be man and woman, or both, because you've been both to me. Find me, Oliver. Find me. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

And yet another part of me knew that if he showed up tonight and I disliked the start of whatever was in store for me, I'd still go through with it, go with it all the way, because better to find out once and for all than to spend the rest of the summer, or my life perhaps, arguing with my body. ~ Andre Aciman

Would I be able to live without his hand on my tummy or around my hips? Without kissing and licking a wound on his hip that would take weeks to heal, but away from me now? Whom else would I ever be able to call by my name?

There would be others, of course, and others after others, but calling them by my name in a moment of passion would feel like a derived thrill, an affectation. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away. ~ Andre Aciman

What was sad was knowing she was most likely the last reminder that there might never be another go. We might still communicate, might still meet for coffee, but the dream was gone, the hand across the table was gone, the square itself was gone. ~ Andre Aciman

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? ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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) ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was separated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. ~ Andre Aciman

Perhaps what I liked far more was the evening. Everything about it thrilled me. Every glance that crossed my own came like a compliment, or like an asking and a promise that simply lingered in midair between me and the world around me. I was electrified - by the chaffing, the irony, the glances, the smiles that seemed pleased I existed, by the buoyant air in the shop that graced everything from the glass door to the petits fours, to the golden ochre spell of plastic glasses filled with scotch whiskey, to Mr. Venga's rolled up sleeves, to the poet himself, down to the spiral staircase where we had congregated with the babe sisters - all seemed to glow with a luster at once spellbound and aroused. ~ Andre Aciman

I don't care to remember - like I know myself - hinted at a realm of human experience only others had access to, not I. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

He kissed me on the mouth, but it wasn't the kiss after the Pasquino, when he'd pressed me hard against the wall on via Santa Maria dell' Anima. I recognized the taste instantly. I'd never realized how much I liked it or how long I'd missed it. One more thing to log on that checklist of things I'd miss before losing him for good. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

How wonderful, to walk half drunk with a Lemonsoda on a muggy night like this around the gleaming slate cobblestones of Rome with someone's arm around me. ~ Andre Aciman

Perhaps it never went away. ~ Andre Aciman

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

I think you can hurt me and I don't want to be hurt. Not that you mean to hurt anyone, but because you're always changing your mind, always slipping, so no one knows where to find you. You scare me. ~ Andre Aciman

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

Besides, thinking that I'd already lost her might ease the tension between us and allow me to regain my footing and act a bit more confidently. What I didn't want to feel was hope and, behind the hope, a craving so fierce that anyone watching me would instantly guess I was utterly and undeniably smitten. ~ Andre Aciman

Is it that you don't like people, or that you just grow tired of them and can't for the life of you remember why you ever found them interesting? ~ Andre Aciman

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

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

So what you're really saying is you'll come only when you think you'll be too old to care. When my kids have left. Or when I'm a grandfather. I can just see us - and on that evening, we'll sit together and drink a strong eau-de-vie, like the grappa your father used to serve at night sometimes."
"And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta facing the Piave memorial, we'll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they'd use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries." But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it,
never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it - it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, 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.
Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber.
Silence. ~ Andre Aciman

I smiled right away, because I caught his attempt to backpedal, which instantly brought complicit smiles to our faces, like a passionate wet kiss in the midst of a conversation between two indviduals who, without thinking, had reached for each other's lips through the scorching red desert both had intentionally placed between them so as not to grope for each other's nakedness. ~ Andre Aciman

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

Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision, nothing. That's why he's such a well-behaved boy. Don't you see? Nothing to rebel against. ~ Andre Aciman

What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere. ~ Andre Aciman

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

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

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. ~ Andre Aciman

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember. Here I would come to escape the known world and seek another of my own invention; I was basically introducing him to my launchpad. ~ Andre Aciman

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

But the whole thing didn't go anywhere - though it never went away either. It just sat there, no past, no future, like a glass of wine filled to the rim but never drunk from. ~ Andre Aciman

At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief - or do they hound you till the bitter end? ~ Andre Aciman

Not a fire of passion, not a ravaging fire, but something paralyzing, like the fire of cluster bombs that suck up the oxygen around them and leave you panting, because you've been kicked in the gut and a vacuum has ripped every living lung tissue and dried your mouth, and you hope nobody speaks, because you can't talk, and you pray no one asks you to move, because your heart is clogged and beats so fast it would sooner spit out shards of glass than let anything else flow through its narrowed chambers. ~ Andre Aciman

I watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it, staring at me so intensely that I thought lovemaking didn't go so far.

"If you just want to spit it out, it's okay, it's really okay, I promise I won't be offended," I said to break the silence more than as a last plea.

He shook his head. I could tell he was tasting it at that very instant. Something that was mine was in his mouth, more his than mine now. ~ Andre Aciman

It belongs to the past," I said, trying to make amends.

"Nothing belongs to the past. ~ Andre Aciman

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

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

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. ~ Andre Aciman

Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It's the asshole, stupid. ~ Andre Aciman

I looked at him: I want one more kiss.

I should, could, have seized him.

By the next morning, things became officially chilly. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

Next to it on the wall was a framed postcard of Monet's berm. I recognized it immediately.

'It used to be mine, but you've owned it far, far longer than I have.' We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives. ~ Andre Aciman

If I put my foot on the floor and pretend that his is just behind the leg of the table, will that foot, like a starship that has turned on its cloaking device, like a ghost summoned by the living, suddenly materialize from its dimple in space and say, I know you've beckoned. Reach and you'll find me? ~ Andre Aciman

I was happy that the room would revert to me. In my/his room, it would be easier to remember our nights.

No, better keep my current room. Then, at least, I could pretend he was still in his, and if he wasn't there, that he was still out as he so frequently used to be on those nights when I counted the minutes, the hours, the sounds. ~ Andre Aciman

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

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

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

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

I knew that he was filled with grief when he finally kissed me one last time in one of the bathroom stalls at Fiumicino Airport and that, even if on the plane the drinks and the movie had distracted him, once alone in his room in New York, he too would be sad again, and I hated thinking of him sad, just as I knew he'd hate to see me sad in our bedroom, which had all too soon become my bedroom. ~ Andre Aciman

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

Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so they'd start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing that in our lives others cannot bring. ~ Andre Aciman

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) ~ Andre Aciman

I couldn't understand how boldness and sorrow, how you're so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Andre Aciman

What had been in my head for so long would now be out in the real world, no longer afloat in my foreverland of ambiguities. ~ Andre Aciman

Aren't those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we've given up hoping they could. ~ Andre Aciman