Harvard Square Quotes

“No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“To live with yourself you had to cut off the hand that offended, cut, slice, peel, scrape, and tear away at yourself till all you were left with were your stripped-down bones. Your bones gave you away; you could not hide your bones, nor could you avoid staring at them. All you wanted was for others to be stripped down like you ...”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Jewish?"
"Moslem?" I replied.
"Just like a Jew: always answers with a question."
"Just like a Moslem: always answers the wrong question.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. "This is the colour of wheat and gold.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn't wait to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I asked him what did it - the opulence, the abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich? "Actually," he said, "it was the ham.”
― Andre Aciman, Harvard Square

“Among Arabs he was a Berber, among Frenchmen an Arab, among his own a nothing, as I'd been a Jew among Arabs, an Egyptian among strangers and now an alien among WASPs, the clueless janitor trying out for the polo team.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I'd lost track of and sloughed off in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.”
― Andre Aciman, Harvard Square

“Like Che Guevara, he'd appear wearing his beret, his pointed beard with the drooping mustache, and the cocksure swagger of someone who has just planted dynamite all over Cambridge and couldn't wait to trigger the fuse, but not before coffee and a croissant.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“...(T)here was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn't take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn't. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its clear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“As far as he was concerned, all women wanted all men. And vice versa. What stood in the way between a man and a woman at Cafe Algiers was a few chairs, a table, maybe a door--material distance. All a man needed was the will and above all the patience to wait out a woman's scruples or help her brush them aside. As in a game of penny poker, he explained, all that matters was simply the will to keep raising the pot by a single penny each time; a single penny, not two; a single penny was easy, you wouldn't even feel it; but you had to wait for her to raise you by a penny as well, which is when you'd raise her by another, she by yet another, and so on. Seduction was not pushing people into doing things they did not wish to do. Seduction was just keeping the pennies coming.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“...he, of all people, understood all about these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“He was not the type to say that experience is all to the good, that nothing is wasted in life, that everyone we meet and everywhere we go, down to the most squalid, insignificant job we hold, plays a tiny role in making us who we become. ... There were no second chances in his book of life; you simply dipped into yourself and pawned the little that was left from earlier deaths.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“I'd heard him tell a woman who complained he never helped her achieve orgasm, that she should treasure the memory of her last orgasm, since it probably predated the French Revolution.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“He had picked up shrink talk from the women he'd met in Cambridge and understood that once a woman bares her soul there's little else she won't bare...”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“When every Jew and every Arab will have killed each other, there'll still be one Arab and one Jew left and they'll continue drinking cinquante-quatres. I just hope there are more like us," he said. "Do you think there are?" Then, not waiting for an answer, he added, "Some friendship. The Arab and the Jew.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Kalaj was in top form.

"If I had a car I'd drive you home right this instant."

"I'll take him if he wants," said the young Moroccan cabdriver.

"How many times do I have to teach you," said Kalaj, reprimanding the abdriver who was more my age than Kalaj's. "Never say 'if he wants' with this kind of honeyed, ersatz tone in your voice. Instead, say, 'I'm taking you home. Let's go.'"

"Well," said the shy Moroccan, "should we go?"

Everyone laughed.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“I have three things: my cab, my zeb, and my dignity. Without one, the other two are worthless.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“What did I tell you?" Kalaj turned to me without even looking at the owner. "Everyone shuts their door in the end.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“It was not flirting, just verbal ping-pong. I was dying to slam the ball but too polite to stop the back-and-forth.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn't forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“...in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Because I didn't want to forget was the heart and soul of poetry.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Kalaj would say, "I've got the eyes of a lynx, the memory of an elephant, the instincts of a wolf ..."
"... and the brain of a tapir," would interrupt his nemesis, the Algerian.”
― Andre Aciman, Harvard Square

“Which is why he said he hated nectarines. Brugnons, in French. People were being nectarized, sweet without kindness, all the right feelings but none of the heart, engineered, stitched, C-sectioned, but never once really born—the head part plum, the ass part peach, and balls the size of Raisinets. The nectarine didn’t have a single living relative in the kingdom of fruit. It was all graft.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Which is why he said he hated nectarines. Brugnons, in French. People were being nectarized, sweet without kindness, all the right feelings but none of the heart, engineered, stitched, C-sectioned, but never once really born—the head part plum, the ass part peach, and balls the size of Raisinets. The nectarine didn’t have a single”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“Not who I am, he’d repeat, emphatically, as if this were the simplified version of a complicated syllogism he’d picked up years ago in a crash course on identity, chatter, and wit in some working-class café on rue Mouffetard in Paris where your nickname is branded on your forehead, your clothes, and your feet.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“She introduced me to John Fowles. I introduced her to Tom Collins.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square

“All I’d been doing these past four years was hide from the merciless world outside the academy, burying myself in books all the while resenting the very walls that sheltered me and made it possible for me to read more books.”
― André Aciman, Harvard Square