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" I was born into a Turkish family that had acquired Italian citizenship. Many members of the family subsequently became British, French, Brazilian, and German, so there was a bit of everything. It was not uncommon for people in the family to speak seven languages: English, French, Ladino, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, and even Greek. "

Andre Aciman

Citizenship

Speak

People

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" Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain. "

" Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to. "

Andre Aciman

Step

Small

" What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on. "

Andre Aciman

Think

Done

" Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future. "

" Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul - each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity. "

" Under Nasser, Egyptian nationalism was built on little more than pan-Arab irredentism and anti-Western and anti-Israeli sentiment. Mr. Mubarak retained these powerful brainwashers and allowed the rise of a religious component to further alienate Egyptians from liberal and democratic thinking. "

" With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos. "

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" Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction. "

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" Chaste love happens all the time, far more frequently than adultery. "

Andre Aciman

Adultery

Love

" Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved. "

Andre Aciman

Meant To Be

Loved

" An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss. "