Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

But sitting here I knew I was experiencing the mitigated bliss of those who are too superstitious to claim they may get all they’ve ever dreamed of but are far too grateful not to know it could easily be taken away.

Bakers and butchers don’t compete, I thought.

suddenly 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.

“I wish I had one friend I wasn’t destined to lose.”

I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again. “Tomorrow let’s go to San Clemente,” I said. “Tomorrow is today,” he replied.

Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot.

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!”