Andre Aciman Quotes
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Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.
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I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.
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Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.
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There are many things about my life that I wish had been different and that I still find difficult to live down.
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What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
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Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to.
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'Almost' is all about gradations and nuance and about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, 'almost' Bordeaux.
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Exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place, they're also seeing - or looking for - another behind it.
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Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.
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For every life we live, there are at least eight others we've gotten close to but may never know.
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Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.
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I tolerate lots of people I have no patience or respect for. Then, as soon as I can, I rat on them.
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An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.
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You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.
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Older students know what they want, which is good.
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There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so.
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'Almost' is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. 'Almost' is about revelation to come but not entirely promised.
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The first thing a writer needs to know is what kind of writer he/she is.
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Under Nasser, Egyptian nationalism was built on little more than pan-Arab irredentism and anti-Western and anti-Israeli sentiment. Mr. Mubarak retained these powerful brainwashers and allowed the rise of a religious component to further alienate Egyptians from liberal and democratic thinking.
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I can't forget the scene in 'My Night at Maud's' when the very pious engineer in the business suit decides to sit on Maud's bed while she is lying under the covers with only a T-shirt on, determined to seduce him.
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'Almost' can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough.
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It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.
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Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul - each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity.
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Don't all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?