cmbyn bot

Quotes from Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman.

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“You changed it. It’s not the same. What did you do to it?”
“I just played it the way Liszt would have played it had he jimmied around with it.”
“Just play it again, please!”

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We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new.

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“If it makes you feel any better, I have to hold back. It’s time you learned too.”
“The best I can do is pretend I don’t care.”
“That much we’ve known for a while already,” he snapped right away.

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What did I want? And why couldn’t I know what I wanted, even when I was perfectly ready to be brutal in my admissions?

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I recognized the taste instantly. I’d never realized how much I liked it or how long I’d missed it.

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I reached for him and muffled my sobs against his shoulder. I was crying because no stranger had ever been so kind or gone so far for me... I was crying because I’d never known so much gratitude and there was no other way to show it.

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“Are you sorry I came?” Was I being intentionally fatuous?
“I’d hold you and kiss you if I could.”
“Me too.”

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It made me hate myself for feeling so hapless, so thoroughly invisible, so smitten, so callow. Just say something, just touch me, Oliver. Look at me long enough and watch the tears well in my eyes.

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I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me.

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and late at night run into each other on the very same piazzetta where two mornings ago so much but really nothing was said between us.

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A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality.

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I liked feeling so rested. Maybe the ancients were right: it never hurt to be bled from time to time.

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Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn’t there to witness and wouldn’t know the first thing about.

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Did it mean, I haven’t forgotten, it’ll always remain between us, even though nothing will come of it?

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None of our summer guests had ever been as freewheeling. But everyone loved him for it, the way everyone grew to love Later!

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Was this what people meant by butter melting?

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I wished I could remember what I’d felt on that afternoon exactly a year ago—that burst of desire followed by its instant antidote, fear.

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I moved closer to him and then hugged him. A child’s hug which I hoped he’d read as an embrace. He did not respond. “That’s a start,” he finally said, perhaps with a tad more humor in his voice than I’d wish.

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Why feel so unhinged just because he wasn’t there or because he’d given me the slip, why sense that all I was doing now was waiting for him—waiting, waiting, waiting?

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He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are