Kozue > Kozue's Quotes

“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, Call Me by Your Name

“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 for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more...”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“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.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“You'll kill me if you stop.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. 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 for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I'm not wise at all. I told you, I know nothing. I know books, and I know how to string words together--it doesn't mean I know how to speak about the tings that matter most to me."

"But you're doing it now--in a way."

"Yes, in a way--that's how I always say things: in a way.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Do I like you?’ I wanted to sound incredulous, as though to question how he could ever have doubted such a thing. But then I thought better of it and was on the point of softening the tone of my answer with a meaning-fully evasive Perhaps that was supposed to mean Abso-lutely, when I let my tongue loose: ‘Do I like you, Oliver? I worship you.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“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, Call Me by Your Name

“Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that's what you are, light of my life. I didn't know what light of my eyes meant, and part of me wondered where on earth had I fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to down in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like and intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell--so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who'll relieve it at night?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in just, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false. ”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again. “Tomorrow let’s go to San Clemente,” I said. “Tomorrow is today,” he replied.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“...you and I , when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it's always themselves they can't stand being alone with...”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Don’t let him be someone else when he’s away. Don’t let him be someone I’ve never seen before. Don’t let him have a life other than the life I know he has with us, with me.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I began reluctantly to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I'd incur in the future.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“In your place, 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 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!”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might have misread and don't want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place - all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. 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 with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same. One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“How is it that some people go through hell trying to get close to you, while you haven’t the haziest notion and don’t even give them a thought when two weeks go by and you haven’t so much as exchanged a single word between you? Did he have any idea? Should I let him know?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on—I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all of my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it. The dream had been right—this was like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life? which was another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“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. Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, He died last night. We missed out on so much. It was a coma. Tomorrow I go back to my coma, and you to yours.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name