Quotes from Andre Aciman

Rituals are magical.

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.

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.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps.

You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.

For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.

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.

I flew on a plane the week after 9/11.

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.'

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.

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.

'Almost' can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough.

Take away our things, and something in us dies.

If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.

We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own.

To those of us who have seen all of Eric Rohmer's films, it is impossible not to remember when, where, with whom we saw each one. I even remember the second and third time I saw his films.

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.

'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.

The first thing a writer needs to know is what kind of writer he/she is.

The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.

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.