376 Quotes by André Aciman

People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.

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

... better to find out once and for all than to spend the rest of the summer, or my life perhaps, arguing with my body...

Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I'd lost track of and sloughed off in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.

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

Wish we could start all over in that room, I said. Both leaning out the window in the evening, rubbing shoulders, as we did in Rome—every day of my life, I said. Every day of mine too. Shirt, toothbrush, score, and I'm flying over, so don't tempt me either.

Oliver was Oliver,' I said, as if that summed things up.'Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi,' my father added, quoting Montaigne's all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë's words: because 'he's more myself than I am.

I had never heard someone his age say "I know myself". It intimidated me.

He's the best person I've known in my life, I said on the night when the tiny fishing boat on which he had sailed out with Anchise early that afternoon failed to return and we were scrambling to find his parents' telephone number in the States in case we had to break the terrible news.