“ 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,… 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… 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 m… 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 bef… 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 ca… 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 soon… 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 bo… 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 be… André Aciman
“ 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. 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… 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… André Aciman
“ Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.But then perhaps this is what lovers are. André Aciman
“ 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… André Aciman
“ And yet, about two weeks after his arrival, all I wanted every night was for him to leave his room, not via its front door, but through the French windows on our balcony. I wanted to hear his window o… André Aciman
“ Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it, black market, grey market, taxed, untaxed, und… André Aciman
“ What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere. 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… 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,… André Aciman
