Esha

“It’s the ruse of the possum: if you do nothing, and danger sees you doing nothing, danger will go away. Ultimately, what it really says is this: if I kill myself a tiny bit each day before you do, won’t this obviate your need for killing me? If I stop my watch, won’t history stop its own? Like a submarine that wants to appear hit, you leave a slick behind you.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we’ve never seen, felt, or lived through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then—never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“… dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“One can say what one likes about death, but I now understand that it is above all a physical need, like hunger or thirst.”
― Agustin Gomez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb