Eight White Nights Quotes

“I don't always think I'm a good person. But telling people this only makes them want to prove me wrong, and the more they try to prove me wrong, the more I want to push them away, but the more I push them away, the guiltier I get, the nicer I become, the more they think I've changed. It never lasts. In the end I learn to hate both myself and them for things that should have lasted no longer than a few hours.' She reflected on this. 'Maybe a few nights. Inky and I could have stayed friends.'
'This is the most twisted thing you've said so far'
'What, that being kind to people makes me want to hurt them? Or that hurting them makes me want to be kind?”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights

“Of course, I feared that the joy I felt, like certain trees, had taken root at the edge of a craggy cliff. They may crane their necks and turn their leaves all they want toward the sun, but gravity has the last word.”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights

“The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights

“suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he’s spied too many such ships before and doesn’t want his hopes dashed again. But”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights

“there were people in the world who, for all their gruff arrogance, can, with scarcely a few notes, easily persuade you they are inherently kind, candid, and vulnerable—with unsettling reminders, though, that their ability to flip from one to the other is what ultimately makes them deadly.”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights

“I threw in, not sure where exactly the parallel was headed, except that I felt emboldened to draw it.”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights

“Besides, thinking that I’d already lost her might ease the tension between us and allow me to regain my footing and act a bit more confidently. What I didn’t want to feel was hope and, behind the hope, a craving so fierce that anyone watching me would instantly guess I was utterly and undeniably smitten.”
― André Aciman, Eight White Nights