[Oh what an absolutely beautifully written book. Wow. Just read these lines. This is definitely a book I will keep coming back to.]
"I'd never heard anyone use 'later' to say goodbye before. It sounded harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again."
"I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first time, and each time I played it, I was sending it to him as a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him."
"Fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I'll die if he doesn't knock on my door, but I'd sooner he never knock than knock now."
"It never occurred to me that what had totally panicked me when he touched me was exactly what startles virgins on being touched for the first time by one person they desire: he stirs nerves in them they never knew existed and that produce far, far more disturbing pleasures than they are used to on their own."
"People laugh at his humor not because he is funny but because he telegraphs his desire to be funny. His humor is nothing more than a way of winning over people he can't persuade."
"... it would never have seemed remotely possible that someone so thoroughly okay with himself might want me to share his body as much as I ached to yield up mine."
"There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well."
"Is this one blushing with shame? No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age."
"You are my homecoming. When I'm with you and we're well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you're with me, Oliver."
"How effortless and free the movement of his shoulder blades each time he shifted, how thoughtlessly they caught the sun."
"Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are 'being' and 'having' thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire..."
"Take your clothes off, Oliver, and come into my bed, let me feel your skin, your hair against my flesh, your foot on mine, even if we won't do a thing, let us cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it's always themselves they can't stand being alone with..."
"Every day, if I don't mess things up, we can ride into town and be back, and even if this is all he is willing to give, I'll take it - I'll settle for less, even, if only to live with these threadbare scraps."
"This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life."
"It was in every word she'd spoken to me that night - untrammeled, frank, human - and in the way her hips responded to mien now, without inhibition, without exaggeration, as though the connection between lips and hips in her body was fluid and instantaneous. A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality."
"I couldn't understand how boldness and sorrow, how you're so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together."
"I'm not sure I want to go ahead with this, but I need to know, and better with you than anyone else. I want to know your body, I want to know how you feel, I want to know you, and through you, me."
"Everyone was available, lived availably - like the city - and assumed everyone else wished to be so as well. I longed to be like them."
"'Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything I'd been in my life - and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name."
"... is quite charming, through I've no idea how your metaphor will help us see who we are, what we want, where we're headed, any more than the wine we've been drinking. But if the job of poetry, like that of wine, is to help us see double, then I propose another toast until we've drunk enough to see the world with four eyes..."
"He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same."
"I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me - a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we've lost and may never have cared for."
"Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away."
"If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name."
