Ren Parks

“We were like children who've suffered an outrage but refuse to confide it to their parents because the shame, which should never have been theirs, was now theirs to shoulder. For us, identity was a mask, not a face. We were provisional people, born sidelined on the wrong side of history. No one was like us, which was why we hid. We were wrong people.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir

“Foreigners often know a city far better than its denizens, the way they know an acquired language better than its native speakers; they just speak with an accent, which will always mark them as outsiders regardless of their efforts to brush off those dead-giveaway inflections that disclose the beat of their hearts.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir

“Most of our time is spent not in the present tense, as we so often claim, but in the irrealis mood—the mood of our fantasy life, the mood where we can shamelessly envision what might be, should be, could have been, who we ourselves wished we really were if only we knew the open sesame to what might otherwise have been our true lives.”
― André Aciman, Homo Irrealis: Essays

“There is something about her he'd like to break”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh