My Roman Year Quotes

“Democratic process is transparent, or claims to be, but frequently leads to war. As for dictators, they invariably end up killed.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir

“Shame, which is the reluctance to own up to who we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us, deeper even than who we are, as though beyond identity are buried reefs and sunken cities teeming with creatures we couldn't begin to name because they've been there since our earliest infancy and never went away.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir

“We were like children who've suffered an outrage but refuse to confide it to their parents because the shame, which should never have been theirs, was now theirs to shoulder. For us, identity was a mask, not a face. We were provisional people, born sidelined on the wrong side of history. No one was like us, which was why we hid. We were wrong people.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir

“My father and I had always been close. We though alike and this scared me sometimes, because his silence with me, like mine with him, was a silence of what Dante called intendimento, of kinship and understanding. I did not want him to see through me, just as I feared seeing through him.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir

“Foreigners often know a city far better than its denizens, the way they know an acquired language better than its native speakers; they just speak with an accent, which will always mark them as outsiders regardless of their efforts to brush off those dead-giveaway inflections that disclose the beat of their hearts.”
― André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir