376 Quotes by André Aciman

And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere.

There is a spot on via Santa Maria dell' Anima that I revisit every time I'm in Rome. I'll stare at it for a second, and suddenly it'll all come back to me. I had just thrown up that night and on the way back to the bar you kissed me. People kept walking by but I didn't care, nor did you. That kiss is still imprinted there, thank goodness. It's all I have from you. This and your shirt.

Maybe every other sorrow I'd known in life suddenly decided to converge on this very one. I had to fight it off. And if he didn't see, it's probably because he himself was not immune to it.

Or had I come with a far more menial purpose? To find him living alone, waiting for me, craving to be taken back to B.? Yes, both our lives on the same artificial respirator, waiting for that time when we'd finally meet and scale our way back to the Piave memorial.

I knew that he was filled with grief when he finally kissed me one last time in one of the bathroom stalls at Fiumicino Airport and that, even if on the plane the drinks and the movie had distracted him, once alone in his room in New York, he too would be sad again, and I hated thinking of him sad, just as I knew he'd hate to see me sad in our bedroom, which had all too soon become my bedroom.

I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was separated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral.

Snow. As ever the silent snow. It hems you in, lifts your spirit, and as you soar awhile it lets you down for being the meaningless ashen powder that it is.

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

Oh, but we do age. We don’t grow up.