Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.

if you can’t say “yes,” don’t say “no,” say “later.” Is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?

“Does it make any sense to you? Not to me.” “Maybe it did when you wrote it,” I said.

this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me.

realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.

how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same.

Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”