376 Quotes by André Aciman

This was the sum of everything I'd been in my life – and more.

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!

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!

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.

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)

How many of us ever make time to know who our parents really were? How many sunken layers deep are those we thought we knew simply because we loved them?

I never got to know the who was the man behind the man I thought my father was. I knew the lawyer only but had never ever seen or met or lived with the pianist. And it kills me still today to not have known and spoken to the pianist. The person I knew was his second self. I suspect we have first selves and second delves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between.

If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.

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