Andre Aciman

Rituals are magical.

— Andre Aciman

“Just wait and be hopeful.”

— André Aciman

I flew on a plane the week after 9/11.

— Andre Aciman

“You’ll kill me if you stop.”

— André Aciman

“Is it better to speak or die?”

— André Aciman

“Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona.”

— André Aciman

“Think of the pain before the pain.”

— André Aciman

“Our bodies won't have secrets now.”

— André Aciman

“We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”

— André Aciman

“...in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.”

— André Aciman

“P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”

— André Aciman

“If youth must canter, then who’ll do the galloping?”

— André Aciman

“the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others.”

— André Aciman

“With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.”

— André Aciman

“In a few days he'd be gone. If only he'd be back exactly a year from now.”

— André Aciman

“If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you.”

— André Aciman

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”

— André Aciman

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”

— André Aciman

“I was going for the devious smile that would suddenly light up his face each time he'd read my mind, when all…

— André Aciman

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

— André Aciman

“I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.”

— André Aciman

With ritual, I punctuate my days till they no longer belong to who I am today but to who I'll be when…

— Andre Aciman

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

— Andre Aciman

“I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of…

— André Aciman

“Which was when a crazier notion possessed me. I undid his bed, took off his suit, and cuddled it between his sheets,…

— André Aciman

“Shame, which is the reluctance to be who we're not even sure we are, could end up being the deepest thing about…

— Andre Aciman

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

— André Aciman

“I did not want passion, I did not want pleasure. Perhaps I didn’t even want proof. And I did not want words,…

— André Aciman

“When I looked at my crotch, to my complete dismay I saw it was damp. Had he seen it? Surely he must…

— André Aciman

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

— Andre Aciman

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

— André Aciman

“I then asked his assistant for a pen, opened up the hardbound edition, and wrote, Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in…

— André Aciman

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

— André Aciman

“He was not the type to say that experience is all to the good, that nothing is wasted in life, that everyone…

— André Aciman

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

— Andre Aciman

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be…

— André Aciman

“He took a breath. “We may never speak about this again. But I hope you’ll never hold it against me that we…

— André Aciman

“I knew that he was filled with grief when he finally kissed me one last time in one of the bathroom stalls…

— André Aciman

“I don't always think I'm a good person. But telling people this only makes them want to prove me wrong, and the…

— André Aciman

“But all of these hours were strained by fear, as if fear were a brooding specter, or a strange, lost bird trapped…

— André Aciman