Andre Aciman

“Take away our things, and something in us dies.”

“Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.”

“Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.”

“The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.”

“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.”

“As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'”

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

“For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.”

“Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.”

“My vacations last one hour. Then I get bored, impatient.”

“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.”

“My family were finally kicked out of Egypt in 1965 for being Jewish. We managed to remain longer than most.”

“A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.”

“To those of us who have seen all of Eric Rohmer's films, it is impossible not to remember when, where, with whom we saw each one. I even remember the second and third time I saw his films.”

“'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.”

“'Almost' can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough.”

“It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.”

“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.”

“Exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place, they're also seeing - or looking for - another behind it.”

“There comes the time at every Passover seder when someone will open a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares into the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us.”