No one writes about love quite like Andre Aciman. For the characters in his books, real life is only achieved through deep, shared human connection, like Elio and Oliver’s. As for the rest of life? The chores, the obligations, the drugerdy of the day-to-day? That’s just filler, a distraction from the things that matter.
Find Me, out October 29, is the sequel to Call Me By Your Name. The book is composed entirely in Aciman’s signature language of love, plus a few conjunctions. It’s as if Aciman established his themes in CMBYN (the power of memory, forked roads, deep love, memorable sex scenes), and then riffs off them constantly in Find Me.
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That means there are lots of chill-inducing quotes. Aciman’s version of “real life” may not be instantly accessible to those of us who can’t conjure up a perfect life partner, like the characters in Find Me seem to do, over and over. But each of Aciman’s soaring sentences contain a faint glimmer of what’s possible — if you believe in the great fairy tale of love.
Here are the most exquisite quotes from Find Me and Call Me By Your Name. Have ‘em ready when you find the one.
“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
— Call Me By Your Name
— Call Me By Your Name
“Perhaps going about one’s daily life with all its paltry joys and sorrows is the surest way of keeping true life at bay.”
— Find Me
— Find Me
“This was the best person I’d ever known in my life. I had chosen him well.”
— Call Me By Your Name
— Call Me By Your Name
“Love is easy. It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both.”
— Find Me
— Find Me
“He was my secret conduit to myself — like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are.”
— Call Me By Your Name
“I don’t want to stop knowing you. So there’s the long and short of it.”
— Find Me
— Find Me
“This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.”
— Call Me By Your Name
— Call Me By Your Name
“Sometimes I don’t know who’s the one thinking, you or I.”
— Find Me
— Find Me
“But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!”
— Call Me By Your Name
— Call Me By Your Name
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“We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
— Call Me By Your Name
— Call Me By Your Name
“I’ve taught you how to earmark moments when time stops, but those moments mean very little unless they’re echoed in someone you love. Otherwise they stay in you and either fester all through your life or, if you’re lucky — and very few are — you’re able to pass them on in something called art.”
— Find Me
— Find Me
“Look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.”
— Call Me By Your Name
— Call Me By Your Name
“Look for me, find me.”
— Find Me
— Find Me