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Famous André Aciman Quotes

“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.”

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“I wished I were like those soldiers in films who run out of bullets and toss away their guns as though they would never again have any use for them, or like runaways in the desert who, rather than ration the water in the gourd, yield to thirst and swill away, then drop their gourd in their tracks. Instead, I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I'd incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda's superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening. When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he'd soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.”

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“Never in my life had I been so happy. Nothing could go wrong, everything was happening my way, all the doors were clicking open one by one, and life couldn't have been more radiant: it was shining right at me, and when I turned my bike left or right, or tried to move away from its light, it followed me as limelight follows an actor onstage. I craved him but I could just as easily live without him, and either way was fine.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“My mother, who hated what she called his Americanisms, ended up calling him Il cauboi—the cowboy. It started as a putdown and soon enough became an endearment, to go along with her other nickname for him, conferred during his first week, when he came down to the dinner table after showering, his glistening hair combed back. La star, she had said, short for la muvi star.”

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“It was just that I was hoping we'd go together.' 'You mean like the other day?' he added, as though to help me say what I couldn't bring myself to say, but making things no easier by pretending to have forgotten the exact day. 'I don't think we'll ever do anything like that again.' I was trying to sound noble and grave in my defeat. 'But, yes, like that.' I could be vague too.”

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“… dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime.”

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“I had meant to take her to my favorite pastry shop after dinner. I'd known happiness there once, or maybe not happiness, but the vision of it. I wanted to see whether the place had changed at all, or whether I had changed, or whether, just by sitting with her I could make up for old loves I'd gotten so close to but had never been bold enough to seize. Always got so very close, and always turned my back when the time came. Manfred and I had dessert here so many times, especially after the movies, and before Manfred, Maud and I, because it was so hot on summer nights that we'd stop to drink fizzy lemonades here, night after night, happy to be together drinking nothing stronger. And Chloe, of course, on those cold afternoons on Rivington Street so many years ago. My life, my real life, had not even happened yet, and all of this was rehearsal still. Tonight, I thought, relishing Joyce's words and feeling exquisitely sorry for myself, the time has come for me to set out on my journey westward. Then I thought of Saint Augustine's words: "Sero te amavi! Late have I loved you!”

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“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.”

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“I wanted to tell him that the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court, the orle of paradise, the whole place, would always be his ghost spot. Instead, I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. When there’s a breeze and they swell and I look up from down here or stand outside on the balcony, I’ll catch myself thinking that you’re in there, staring out from your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when I found you on the rock, I’ve been happy here. You’re thousands of miles away but no sooner do I look at this window than I’ll think of a bathing suit, a shirt thrown on on the fly, arms resting on the banister, and you’re suddenly there, lighting up your first cigarette of the day—twenty years ago today. For as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot—and mine too, I wanted to say.”

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“Outside, the night was settling fast. I liked the peace and the silence of the countryside, with its fading alpenglow and darkling view of the river. Oliver country, I thought. The mottled lights from across the other bank beamed on the water, reminding me of Van Gogh’s 'Starlight Over the Rhone.' Very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, and as always at Indian summer twilight, that lingering mix of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and always the illusion of summer months ahead, which wears itself out no sooner than the sun has set.”

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“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.”

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“Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him '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.”

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“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.”

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“Sono come te" ha detto. "Mi ricordo tutto." Mi sono fermato un secondo. Se ti ricordi tutto, volevo dirgli, e se sei davvero me, allora domani prima di partire o quando sei pronto per chiudere la portiera del taxi e hai già salutato gli altri e non c'è più nulla da dire in questa vita, allora, una volta soltanto, girati verso di me, anche per scherzo, o perché ci hai ripensato, e, come avevi già fatto allora, guardami negli occhi, trattieni il mio sguardo, e chiamami col tuo nome.”

Chiamami Col Tuo Nome
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“Ero già prontissimo a etichettare Oliver come difficile e inavvicinabile, e a non avere più nulla a che spartire con lui. Ma due parole bastarono perché la mia imbronciata apatia si trasformasse in: Suonerò qualunque cosa per te finché non mi dirai di smettere, finché non sarà ora di pranzo, finché non mi verrà via la pelle dai polpastrelli, strato dopo strato, perché mi piace fare qualcosa per te, farò tutto quello che vorrai, devi soltanto dirmelo, mi sei piaciuto dal primo giorno e, perfino quando riceverò gelo in cambio delle mie rinnovate offerte d'amicizia, non dimenticherò mai che ci siamo detti queste cose e che non è poi così difficile ritrovare l'estate dopo una tormenta di neve.”

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“È inciso in ogni canzone che spopolava allora, in ogni romanzo che ho letto durante e dopo il suo soggiorno, in ogni cosa, dal profumo del rosmarino nelle giornate calde al frinire concitato delle cicale di pomeriggio: odori e suoni, in mezzo ai quali ero cresciuto e con cui fino ad allora avevo convissuto ogni anno della mia vita ma che poi d'un tratto riscoprivo eccitanti, arricchiti di una sfumatura particolare, per sempre colorata da ciò che accadde quell'estate.”

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