Mauricio McFarlane

“He regretted his offer the instant he made it, for the truth was that Jude was his favorite of the three of them to paint: He was the most beautiful of them, with the most interesting face and the most unusual coloring, and he was the shyest, and so pictures of him always felt more precious than ones of the others.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I looked up at the moon and meant to ask about my life. But her answer came far sooner than I was able to formulate the question. For twenty years you’ve lived a dead man’s life. Everyone knows. Even your wife and your children and your wife’s friend, and the couple you met at a conference on the Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich can read it on your face. Erica and Paul know it, and those scholars who study Greek fire and Greek triremes, even the Pre-Socratics themselves, dead two thousand years ago, can tell. The only one who doesn’t know is you. But now even you know. You’ve been disloyal. To what, to whom? To yourself. I”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“I was sure of myself once, I thought I knew things, knew myself, and people loved that I reached out to touch them when I blustered into their lives and didn’t even ask or doubt that I mightn’t be welcome. Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me. Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn’t change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we’ve always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we’ve buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live. What do I want? Do you know the answer, Herr Bach? Is there such a thing as a right or wrong life? I’m an artist, my friend, I don’t do answers. Artists know questions only. And besides, you already know the answer.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“the only thing uniting them being their newness to America and their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life