American - Writer | January 2, 1951 -
Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.
Andre Aciman
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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.
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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.
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Rituals are magical.
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I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.
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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.
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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.
AgeWritingDeepWishPersonal
In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.
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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.
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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.
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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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With ritual, I punctuate my days till they no longer belong to who I am today but to who I'll be when I look back in days and years to come.
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