Andre Aciman Quotes
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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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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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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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Egypt wants to be young again. Israel must show it never grew old. Egypt wants to wake up and dream again. Israel must learn to dream though it cannot sleep.
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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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I was born into a Turkish family that had acquired Italian citizenship. Many members of the family subsequently became British, French, Brazilian, and German, so there was a bit of everything. It was not uncommon for people in the family to speak seven languages: English, French, Ladino, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, and even Greek.
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Authors use 'almost' to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something inauthentic, dishonest, unfinished, undecided or even unwholesome - some might say repulsive, tacky, snub-nosed, too direct - in qualifying anything as definitely a this or a that.
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There comes the time at every Passover seder when someone will open a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares into the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us.
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The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'
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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?
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With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.
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A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.
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Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
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As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'
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'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.
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I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.
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Am I the only person who wishes he could escape his own life for a few hours?
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Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.
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Writing plays fast and loose with the past.
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My family were finally kicked out of Egypt in 1965 for being Jewish. We managed to remain longer than most.
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Take away our things, and something in us dies.
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As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'
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In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.
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Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.