Enigma Variations Quotes

“So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I've lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“And then it hits me: I've lost you. You now rank among the things I'll always regret: opportunities lost, children never had, things I might have accomplished or done far better, lovers who have come and gone.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Yes, the past is a foreign country," I said, "but some of us are full-fledged citizens, others occasional tourists, and some floating itinerants, itching to get out yet always aching to return."

"There's a life that takes place in ordinary time," I said, "and another that bursts in but just as suddenly fizzles out. And then there's the life we may never reach but that could so easily be ours if only we knew how to find it. It doesn't necessarily happen on our planet, but is just as real as the one we live by—call it our 'star life.' Nietzsche wrote that estranged friends may become declared enemies but in some mysterious way continue to remain friends, though on a totally different sphere. He called these 'star friendships.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“You're alone, as I'm alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won't solve a thing.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“. . . love, which happens only once in life, and thereafter is never quite spontaneous or impulsive.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“What was sad was knowing she was most likely the last reminder that there might never be another go. We might still communicate, might still meet for coffee, but the dream was gone, the hand across the table was gone, the square itself was gone.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Your problem is not that you misread signs; all you see are signs.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I wanted to scream. When I'm with you, I feel I can take what others call my life and turns its face away from the wall. My entire life faces the wall except when I'm with you. I stare at my life and want to undo every mistake, every deceit, turn a new leaf, turn the table, turn the clock. I want to put a real face on my life, not the drab front I've been wearing since forever. So why can't I speak to you now?”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Why have we waited so long?"

I didn't know the answer. "Maybe because what we want hasn't been invented yet."

"Maybe because it doesn't exist."

"Which is why I dread how this ends."

"Good night," she said, turning her back to me, while I wrapped my arms around her.

"I know one thing, though," she said without turning around.

"What?"

"This doesn't end, whatever happens. Never, never ends." I tightened my arms around her. "Star love, my love, star love. It may not live but it never dies. It's the only thing I'm taking with me, and you will too, when the time comes.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“This was all in the head. And that's where it stays.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Our star life, yours with mine. As someone said over dinner once, each of us is given at least nine versions of our lives, some we guzzle, others we take tiny, timid sips from, and some our lips never touch.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Or were we like people who have died before their time and are given a second chance by some minor deity, but with so many provisos that the new life feels like a deferred death?”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“If I had a tumor, then I'd be dead before the year was out, and if I were dead, then there'd be nothing left, no second chances, no leap-year parties, and this waiting for the right time would have been for nothing. I will have died having lived the wrong life. No, not lived: waited.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Let the snake that bit you bite me back. Let it bite me on the lip. Die with me.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“In the words of the poet, my heart was in the east with you, but my body was out west.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“But the whole thing didn't go anywhere—though it never went away either. It just sat there, no past, no future, like a glass of wine filled to the rim but never drunk from.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Stop it. Learn to take things at face value. You're always looking for what's not there.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Ours, I began to fear, was a script without parts.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“How can we ever bring ourselves to make love again, I thought, if we can speak of our love only by oblique reference to death?”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Snow. As ever the silent snow. It hems you in, lifts your spirit, and as you soar awhile it lets you down for being the meaningless ashen powder that it is.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I had meant to take her to my favorite pastry shop after dinner. I'd known happiness there once, or maybe not happiness, but the vision of it. I wanted to see whether the place had changed at all, or whether I had changed, or whether, just by sitting with her I could make up for old loves I'd gotten so close to but had never been bold enough to seize. Always got so very close, and always turned my back when the time came. Manfred and I had dessert here so many times, especially after the movies, and before Manfred, Maud and I, because it was so hot on summer nights that we'd stop to drink fizzy lemonades here, night after night, happy to be together drinking nothing stronger. And Chloe, of course, on those cold afternoons on Rivington Street so many years ago. My life, my real life, had not even happened yet, and all of this was rehearsal still. Tonight, I thought, relishing Joyce's words and feeling exquisitely sorry for myself, the time has come for me to set out on my journey westward. Then I thought of Saint Augustine's words: "Sero te amavi! Late have I loved you!”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Now, how far away did Abingdon Square feel, as though it and she and the restaurant, and Maria Malibran, and the sudden false rainfall by the flickering lights of the Miramar hotel sign belonged to another life, a life unlived, a life I knew had turned its back to me and was being nailed to the wall.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“E soprattutto la pedita di persone che non sapevo nemmeno di dover ancora incontrare e amare ma di cui poi avevo perso le tracce e che non avevo rivisto mai più.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Il rimpianto è lo strumento che abbiamo per sperare di tornare alla nostra vita reale dopo aver trovato la volontà - la forza cieca e il coraggio - di barattare la vita che ci è stata data con la vita che porta il nostro nome e quello soltanto. Il rimpianto è lo strumento che abbiamo per desiderare cose perdute da tempo ma in realtà mai possedute. Il rimpianto è speranza senza convinzione, dissi. Siamo combattuti fra il rimpianto, che è il prezzo da pagare per le cose non fatte, e il rimorso, che è il prezzo pagato per averle fatte.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I've lived and loved by your light alone.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“But that reasoning perhaps was as much a mask as the others. In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I'd grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“We lead many lives, nurse more identities than we care to admit, are given all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations