Alibis Quotes

“New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Every walk carves out a new city. And each of these tiny cities has its main square, a downtown area all its own, its own memorial statue, its own landmarks, laundromats, bus terminal—in short, its own focal point (from the Latin word focus, meaning fireplace, hearth, foyer, home), warm spot, sweet spot, soft spot, hot spot.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves – the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Conversely, there are places I bid farewell to long before knowing I must leave, places and people whose disappearance I rehearse not just to learn how to live without them when the time comes but to put off their loss by foreseeing ita bit at a time beforehand. I live in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness comes. I do the same with life, making it more conditional and provisional than it already is, so as to forget that one day my birthday will come around and I won't be there to celebrate it.
It is still unthinkable that those who cause us the greatest pain and turned us inside out could at some point in time have been totally unknown, unborn to us.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Sometimes the clothes and scents we wear have more of us in them than we do ourselves.
The search for ideal lavender was like the search for that part of me that needed nothing more than a fragrance to emerge from the sleep of thousands. I searched for it the way I searched for my personal color, or for a brand of cigarettes, or for my favorite composer. Finding the right lavender would finally allow me to say "Yes, this is me. Where was I all this time?”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“For me to write, I need to work my way back out of one home, consider another, and find the no-man's-land in between. I need to go to one Andre, unwrite that Andre, choose the other Andre across the way, only then go looking for the middle Andre, whose voice will most likely approximate the voice of an Andre able to camouflage all telltale signs that English is not his mother tongue, but that neither is French, nor Italian, nor Arabic. Writing must almost have to fail - it must almost not succeed. If it goes well from the start, if I am in the groove, if I come home to writing, it's not the writing for me. I need to have lost the key and to find no replacement. Writing is not a homecoming. Writing is an alibi. Writing is a perpetual stammer of alibis.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: "We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone's mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals."
I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone else was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them. The world in my image.All I cared for were streets that bore my name and the trace of my passage there; and all I wanted were novels in which everyone's soul was laid bare and anatomized because nothing interested me more than the nether, undisclosed aspects of people and things that were identical to mine. Exposed, everyone would turn out to be just like me. They understood me, I understood them, we were no longer strangers. I dissembled, they dissembled. The more they were like me, the more I'd learn to accept and perhaps grow to like who I was. My hunches, my insights were nothing more than furtive ways of bridging the insuperable distance between me and the world.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“In that room on Via Clelia, I manage to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside it. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over this buildings, a film that washed down Via Clelia like a sheet of rainwater, casting a shimmering spell on this hard, humdrum, here-and-now area of lower-middle-class Rome.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“The bottles are stand-ins for me. I keep them the way the ancient Egyptians kept all of their household belongings: for that day when they'd need them in their afterlife. To part with them now is to die before my time. And yet, there are times when I think there should have been many, many other bottles there - not just bottles I lost or forgot about, but bottles I never owned, bottles I didn't even know existed and, but for a tiny accident, might have given an entirely different scent to my life. There is a street I pass by every day, never once suspecting thatin years to come it will lead to an apartment I still donÄt know will be mine one day. How can I not know this - isn't there a science?”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Fragrances linger for decades, and our loved ones may remember us by them, but the legend in each vial clams up the moment we're gone. Our genie speaks to no one. He simply watches as those he's love open and investigates. He's dying to scream with the agony of then Rosetta stones begging to be heart across centuries.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“The better a writer, the better he erases his footprints- yet the better the writer, the more he wants us to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author’s soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“To die is to forget you ever lived. To die is to forget you loved, or suffered, or got and lost things you wanted. Tomorrow, you say to yourself, I won't remember anything, won't remember this face, this knee, this old scar, or the hand that wrote all this.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Conversely, there are places I bid farewell to long before knowing I must leave, places and people whose disappearance I rehearse not just to learn how to live without them when the time comes but to put off their loss by foreseeing it a bit at a time beforehand. I live in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness comes. I do the same with life, making it more conditional and provisional than it already is, so as to forget that one day my birthday will come around and I won’t be there to celebrate it.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Thus, I too look at my life and stare at its blind spots: scents I never discovered; bottles I haven’t stumbled on and don’t know exist; selves I haven’t been but can’t claim to miss; pockets in time I should have but never did live through; people I could have met but missed out on; places I might have visited, gotten to love, and ultimately lived in, but never traveled to. They are the blank tiles, the “rare-earth” moments, the roads never taken.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we’ve never seen, felt, or lived through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then—never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“It is only when it’s too late that one comes to understand how close one came to bliss … or how needless our sorrows were when they drove us to despair.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle. Bookish people.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“… dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“I count the days because I love them too much. I count the days, already knowing that one day I will remember how tactless it was of me to have counted the days when I could so easily have enjoyed them. I count the days to pretend that losing all this doesn’t faze me.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“It’s the ruse of the possum: if you do nothing, and danger sees you doing nothing, danger will go away. Ultimately, what it really says is this: if I kill myself a tiny bit each day before you do, won’t this obviate your need for killing me? If I stop my watch, won’t history stop its own? Like a submarine that wants to appear hit, you leave a slick behind you.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“You go out into the world to acquire all manner of habits and learn all sorts of languages, but the one tongue you neglect most is the one you’ve spoken at home, just as the customs you feel most comfortable with are those you never knew were customs until you saw others practice completely different ones and realized you didn’t quite mind your own, though you’d strayed so far now that you probably no longer knew how to practice them.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere