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Life Quotes by Andre Aciman

63 Life quotes by Andre Aciman

All Life quotes Andre Aciman’s page

A quote that says life is more about our impression of things than about facts highlights how feelings shape our world. Other lines speak of longing for another soul and of imagining a foot turning into a hidden starship, showing how imagination mixes with desire. The writer also notes that we touch many lives, even if we never fully know them.

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'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.

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Am I the only person who wishes he could escape his own life for a few hours?

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“I wondered what their life together was like.”

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“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”

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“This was the best person I’d ever known in my life. I had chosen him well.”

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If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams…

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“Don’t let him be someone else when he’s away. Don’t let him be someone I’ve never seen before. Don’t let him have…

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For every life we live, there are at least eight others we've gotten close to but may never know.

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There are many things about my life that I wish had been different and that I still find difficult to live down.

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Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades…

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“I’m not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together—it…

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Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps.

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“Any moment now we were going to say goodbye. Suddenly part of my life was going to be taken away from me…

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“What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me…

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“Don’t let him be someone else when he’s away. Don’t let him be someone I’ve never seen before. Don’t let him have…

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“I could spend the rest of my life like this: with him, at night, in Rome, my eyes totally shut, one leg…

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“I knew they didn't suspect a thing, and it bothered me—though I wouldn't have wanted it otherwise. It told me that if…

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“Or had I come with a far more menial purpose? To find him living alone, waiting for me, craving to be taken…

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“You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call…

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“How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most…

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“I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his…

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“We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. "Don't flush," I'd said, "I…

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“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when…

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“I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way.…

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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…

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“Is it your body that I want when I think of lying next to it every night or do I want to…

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“So what if he saw? Now he knows. What never crossed my mind was that someone else who lived under our roof,…

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“You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle…

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“Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being…

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“Why did I do it?" I finally asked him. "Because you couldn't stand it, because you were choking, that's why. Perfectly understandable."…

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“Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and…

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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…

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“This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to…

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“The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not…

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Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things,…

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No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns…

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“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via . Dante…

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“Looking at him now from the balustrade, I felt something so tender for him that it reminded me how eagerly I had…

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With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life,…

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“What does this say about the life you've lived, then?' 'Part of it— just part of it —was a coma, but I…

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More by Andre Aciman

Don't all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and…

“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…

Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us,…

“I desperately wanted to give him something. By contrast, taking seemed so bland, so facile, so mechanical.”

“The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.”

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about…

“Well, since you're not going to do anything with me—can you at least read me a story? I'd settle for that. I wanted him…

“This is heaven.” And I wouldn’t hear him say another word for at least an hour. There was nothing I loved more in life…

“He loved the sticky taste. What had I done? I told him and pointed to the bruised evidence sitting on my desk. “Let me…

“When had they separated us, you and me, Oliver? And why did I know it, and why didn't you?”

“As we were swimming back, he asked as though it were an afterthought, “Are you going to hold last night against me?”

“To be with you. To be with you, Oliver. With or without my bathing suit. To be with you on my bed. In your…

“I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into…

“Oliver: But there's the catch: you're still twenty years younger than those gathered around you, which is why I can be twenty-four in a…

I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.