Quotes by André Aciman

About André Aciman:

André Aciman is a writer, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York teaching the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. His memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), won a Whiting Award. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University. In 2009 Aciman was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University. His influences include Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 a...

André Aciman

It would never have occurred to him that in placing the apricot in my palm he was giving me his ass to hold or that, in biting the fruit, I was also biting into that part of his body that must have been fairer than the rest because it never apricates...

André Aciman

We had never taken a shower together. We had never even been in the same bathroom together. "Don't flush," I'd said, "I want to look." What I saw brought out strains of compassion, for him, for his body, for his life, which suddenly seemed so frail a...

André Aciman

They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up w...

André 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 ...

André Aciman

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 ...

André 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 uncertaint...

André Aciman

What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not her, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You'll kill me if you stop, you'll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the...

André Aciman

Everyone goes through a period of - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other . Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns...

André Aciman

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 f...

André 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....

André Aciman

And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break ...

André Aciman

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

André 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-...

André Aciman

...he, of all people, understood all about these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul.

André Aciman

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

André 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 a...

André Aciman

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

André Aciman

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

André 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...

André Aciman

Author Bio

  • NameAndré Aciman
  • Descriptionwriter, professor
  • BornJanuary 2, 1951
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Lambda Literary Award