Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what's tearing me up.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I live for this. And if this is all there is, well, this is all there is.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking that one day I won't be here to see it and I know I'll miss it, even if I won't have a heartbeat to miss anything. I miss it now for the-days-when, the way I miss places I've never traveled to or things I've never done." "What things have you never done?" "You're young and you're very handsome—how could you possibly understand?" He removed his arm. He lived in a future that wouldn't be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn't been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward. I felt for him.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Yes, the past is a foreign country", I said, "but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I'd ever known in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I've been doing all these years living.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“As long as we can be one with something, anything, we're okay.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“But no one can prepare for the worst. The worst doesn't only dash hopes; it tears through everything in ways that are almost meant to hurt, to punish, to shame. Despite my most sobering forecasts, life can still play the cruelest card and scuttle everything—and just when I thought we were sailing past the shoals.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“If only I could dream of you. Sometimes I do. But not often enough. Dreams are like practice runs and mini-rehearsals; they tell us what we'll do, when to ask, how we'll touch when the time comes, if the time comes.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“When I saw you after my dream, it was impossible to go through with anything I'd resolved. You were chilly again, as though you'd intercepted my dream and were so horrified that you thought it best to put distance between us. I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don't fly out and rat on one another's dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves. Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren't willing to hide while dreaming. I wished you'd taken a second look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn't you?”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I was his friend. There was nothing more to want.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“She reminds me of infatuated women in 1940s movies who travel by ship and lounge alone on deck and cannot read and all they want is to stroll about at night until the man they love shows up again and offers to light their cigarette.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I'm like someone who never got off a train that traveled past the last stop.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Neither of us was quite sure what the other meant, but, as in dreams, our words could be taken in so many ways, which was fine too, because we liked thinking they had more than one meaning, one obvious, one not so obvious, one hinted at but so muddled that neither of us knew which to grasp, because each was so laced into the others that all three ultimately meant one and the same thing.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“And as I opened the door, I pivoted and performed what I hoped was one of those accomplished inspectors' by the way exit lines seen in so many movies: Did she happen to know how one could reach Giovanni, the cabinetmaker?”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I should find someone to speak to, but—and the thought jolts me because I wasn't careful to nip it—the only one who'd understand is the very one I wish to lash out against. I'm like those seeking comfort or, better yet, advice, from the very person who abuses them.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I think of the poor man selling hot dogs all day, already planning what he'll need to pack up, what to give away, what to remember, what to let go of, things, places, people, a lifetime.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I had no idea why I'd written these words. But it was the first time I had taken something in my chest about you and put it in words out into the real world.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Until now, talk has never gone anywhere. All I do is steal wisps of information in the hope of cobbling together your portrait, the way sketch artists do at police stations.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Yours, I realize, is the first real card on the table. I admire this. Mine had been just a joker.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“You remembered," she said, surprised that this thing called time had happened to us after all.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“In the crowded room with the view of the Hudson, the realization that ours was a stillborn love began to cramp something in me. It wasn't going to kill me, but I wanted to find a corner somewhere in this large apartment where I could be alone and hate myself.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations