[quotes] Poor Economics, a Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo 2011

 

"So it is not that the lack of food could not be a problem or isn't a problem from time to time, but the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for hunger to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty. This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Amartya Sen has shown, however, most recent famines have been caused not by lack of food availability but by institutional failures that led to poor distribution of available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere."

"Is is probably the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer's herbs and spells?"

"In the end, the mistrust of incentives for immunization comes down to an article of faith for both those on the right and the left of the mainstream political spectrum: Don't try to bribe people to do things that you think they ought to do. For the right, this is because it will be wasted; for the conventional left, which includes much of the public health community and the good doctors from Seva Mandir, this is because it degrades both what is given and the person who gets it. Instead, we should focus on trying to convince the poor of the benefits of immunization."

"For the same reason that those who live in rich countries live a life surrounded by invisible nudges, the primary goal of health-care policy in poor countries should be to make it as easy as possible for the poor to obtain preventive care, while at the same time regulating the quality of treatment that people can get... All this sounds paternalistic, it certainly is. But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?"

"The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace."

"The school Abhijit went to in Calcutta had a more or less explicit policy of expelling the bottom of the class every year, so that by the time the graduation exam cam around, it could claim a perfect pass record."

"In the treatment areas in Matlab, this change was faster than elsewhere - the community health worker, who tended to be a relatively well-educated and assertive woman, was both the embodiment of the new norm and the carrier of news about the shifting norms in the rest of the world."

"The right space for policy is not so much to replace the family as it is to complete its action and, sometimes, protect us from its abuses. Starting from the right understanding of how families function is crucial in being able to do so effectively."

"It is too hard to stay motivated when everything you want looks impossibly far away. Moving the goalposts closer may be just what the poor need to start running toward them."

"The emphasis on government jobs, in particular, suggests a desire for stability, as these jobs tend to be very secure even when they are not very exciting. And in fact, stability of employment appears to be the one thing that distinguishes the middle classes from the poor."

"This statement was a good reflection of an institutionalist view that has strong currency in development economics today. The real problem of development, in this view, is not one of figuring out good policies: It is to sort out the political process. If the politics are right, good policies will eventually emerge. And conversely, without good politics, it is impossible to design or implement good policies, at least not on any scale. There is no point in figuring out the best way to spend a dollar on schools, if 87 cents will never reach the school anyway. It follows (or so it is assumed) that 'big questions' require 'big answers' - social revolutions, such as a transition to effective democracy."

"Acemoglu and Robinson define institutions as follows: 'Economic institutions shape economic incentives, the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. Political institutions determine the ability of citizens to control politicians."

"As a result, the agents of the government (the bureaucrats, the pollution inspectors, the policemen, the doctors) cannot be paid directly for the value they are delivering to the rest of us - when a policemen gives us a ticket, we complain, but we don't offer him a reward for doing this job well and keeping the roads safe for everyone. Contrast this with the grocery store owner: She delivers value by selling us eggs, and when we pay her for the eggs, we know we are paying for the social value she is delivering."

"This simple observation has two very important implications: First, there is no easy way of assessing the performance of most people who work for the government. This is why there are so many rules for what bureaucrats (or policemen, or judges) should and shouldn't do. Second, the temptation to break the rules is ever present, both for the bureaucrat and for us, which is what leads to corruption and dereliction of duty."

"This is one important reason why government programs (and similar programs run by NGOs and international organizations) often do not work. The problem is inherently difficult and the details need a lot of attention. Failures are often not the result of sabotage by a specific group, as a lot of political economists would have it, but come about because the whole system was badly conceived to start with and no one has taken the trouble to fix it. In such cases, change can be a matter of figuring out what will work and leading the charge."

"The rules were (obviously) not designed with the objective of undermining the effectiveness of the entire health-care system in India. On the contrary, they were probably put on paper by a well-meaning bureaucrat, who had his own views of what the system should do and did not pay too much attention to what that demanded on the ground. This is what we call, for short, the 'three I's' problem: ideology, ignorance, inertia. This problem plagues many efforts to supposedly help the poor."

"We have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty, so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world - elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO workers, academics and entrepreneurs - in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day."

[quotes] How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee 2018

 

"And, of course, what was he thinking about? Which was a way of hoping he was thought about me."

"I can say that love and money are what most of my querents wanted to know about... It's the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there's a demon lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read."

"I felt shallow, but I was there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you."

"I was someone who didn't know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet. This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers."

"You are only one of you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it's on Tunis or the trees outside your windows, is what matters. Don't worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible."

"Talent isn't enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they're dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I'm writing. Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent - promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident-at-the-beginning to being a writer, and I learned that from her."

"Go to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there."

"I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have."

"He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was when he got in trouble. And so be made sure he was never alone."

"Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just part my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was."

"I wasn't rich in here in New York, but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow."

"The lesson for me at least - and I think of as the gift of the garden, learned every year I lived in that apartment: you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined."

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people - that is, to nonwriters in a capitalism system - for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time."

"I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My longstanding love for singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this was that I didn't feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity - any identity, really - was unreliable precisely because it was self-made."

"The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen."

"It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because you are never sure which version of the person you are with - the one who is hidden or the one trying to be free."

"I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this."

"I could see I had been very angry with her. A child's anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her to guess my thoughts. The adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it."

"The therapist gave me an exercise. You can't get rid of the guardians who've kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they've been doing since you were a child."

"You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become."

"What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?"

"Conservatism's oldest con is getting a voter to yell 'thief' at someone the thief chooses, the thief they voted for. And now we are in the final phase."

"Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine."

[quotes] Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler 1998

 

[The back cover has this quote from the New Yorker: "In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler's 'Parable' books may be unmatched." I can't agree with that more. I consumed this book in two days and it made me very paranoid about where the world can be headed under the wrong influence - we are already seeing symptoms of that now. This series also inspires me to build something with community. What can we learn together? How can we nourish each other? How else do we need to prepare the earth and ourselves for the Destiny we define? Oh Octavia Butler, thank you for entering my life.]

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

"Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all ack to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can't read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them."

"Indenturing indigents, young and old, is much in fashion now ... Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it's just one more way of getting people to work for nothing or almost nothing. Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor."

"Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even the Earthseed Destiny seems to have little to do with religion."

"We moved Dan's cot so that he could use the garden trowel and watering can, and we let him plant his own seedlings. He, too, did what he had to do without help. The ritual was already important to him. It was something he could do for his sisters and his parents. It was all he could do for them."

"If my mother had created only Acorn, the refuge for the homeless and the orphaned... If she had created Acorn, but not Earthseed, then I think she would have been a wholly admirable person."

"None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once."

"It shouldn't be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction."

"How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented - reeducated - before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know. There's war, for instance."

"On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side - a side of yourself or your organization that's dangerous and unpredictable - willing to do any damned thing."

"Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear."

"I will go with the first ship to leave after my death. If I thought I could survive as something other than a burden, I would go on this one, alive. No matter. Let them someday use my ashes to fertilize their crops. Let them do that. It's arranged. I'll go, and they'll give me to their orchards and their groves."

[poems] catalog of unabashed gratitude - ross gay 2015

 

[ross gay has such a unique talent of being able to string different scenes and thoughts together in a coherent and beautiful way - moving from one thought to another seamlessly. Here are a few of my favorite poems and phrases. And I dream of one day being able to write about my garden as welcomingly as ross gay writes about his orchard.]

to the fig tree on 9th and christian 

ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt

feet

ode to sleeping in my clothes

c'mon!

"beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it." - to the fig tree on 9th and christian 

"Feel the small song in my chest swell and my coat glisten and twitch." - becoming a horse

"when his loneliness dragged him to a carpeted room in an apartment building in Chinatown" - sharing with the ants

"marching across the long plains of the calf and the meticulously unnamed zone behind the knee over the hamstring into use your imagination for Chrissakes but I will tell you it is dark there and sweet" - sharing with the ants

"the way Myself had made unwittingly a habit of slathering mortar everywhere, almost by accident, for fear of what might forever slip in and be felt;"- the opening

"for jumping and grabbing at once like this a soft thing is hard be gentle she said emerging from the dugout beneath the mulberry tree" - to the mulberry tree

"I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it." - catalog of unabashed gratitude

"thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land" - catalog of unabashed gratitude

"I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward, the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems slipping into your eyes." - catalog of unabashed gratitude

[quotes] When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago 1993

 

"I had my last guava the day we left Puerto Rico."

"My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be jibaros. But I couldn't be one, nor was I to call anyone a jibaro, lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn't yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on."

"A bubble of rage built inside my chest and forced out a scream meant for Mami's harshness and Papi's indifference but directed at Delsa who was smaller. I pushed her off the stump."

"'Well, it is the soul of a person that writes poetry ... The soul lives inside a person when he's alive. It's the part of a person that feels. A poet's soul feels more than regular people's souls. And that's what makes him write poetry."

"There was no rice on the chart, no beans, no salted codfish. There were big white eggs, not at all like the small round ones our hens gave us. There was a tall glass of milk, but no coffee. There were wedges of yellow cheese, but no balls of cheese like the white queso del pais wrapped in banana leaves sold in bakeries all over Puerto Rico. There were bananas but no plantains, potatoes but no batatas, cereal flakes  but no oatmeal, bacon but no sausages."

"And I wished that I knew how to pray, because then I could speak to God and maybe He or one of His saints could explain things to me. But I didn't know any prayers, because Mami didn't believe in church or holy people, and Papi, even though he read the Bible and could lead novenas for the dead, never talked to us about God."

"But he didn't, and when Abuela came out from her prayers, we sat by the door, working our needles in, around, up, and out, silently making patterns with thread that might have told a story had either one of us known how to transform our feelings into shape."

"I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."

"I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybeline."

"Someone down there can look up through the hole and see my private parts, I thought. There is someone down there. A dead person is in that water waiting for me to squat so that it can claw me in and drown me in turds and pee. There are eyes looking up from that black pool, seeing parts of me that even I can't see."

"I tossed until dawn, unused to so much room on the bed, while on the other side of the wall, my sisters and brothers slept, their bodies gently rising and falling in rhythm with one another's breathing."

"I crouched against the wall and watched them injure each other without touching each other, hurling words that had the same effect as acid on metal."

"For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jibara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting."

"I dozed, startled awake, panicked when I didn't know where I was, remembered where we were going, then dozed off again, to repeat the whole cycle, in and out of sleep, between earth and sky, somewhere between Puerto Rico and New York."

"They dressed like Americanos but walked with a jaunty hop that made them look as if they were dancing down the street, only their hips were not as loose as Puerto Rican men's were. According to Mami, they too lived in their own neighborhoods, frequented their own restaurants, and didn't like Puerto Ricans."

"Men only want one thing, and until then, I thought it was up to me to give it up. But that's not the way it was. A little girl leaning out a window watching the world fulfilled the promise Marilyn Monroe made with her eyes. I who had promised nothing, who knew even less, whose body was as confusing as the rock and roll lyrics accompanying the trucker's hand pumping up and down to words yelled, not sung."

"We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives."

"The men they beat up; the women, they raped. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked to school, or home from the library: every man was a potential rapist, and every dark doorway was a potential hiding place for someone waiting to hurt me."

"'You'll be exposed to a different class of people,' she assured me, and I felt the force of her ambition without knowing exactly what she meant."

[quotes] Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals - Alexis Pauline Gumbs 2020

 

[This book was apparently started as a series of Instagram posts and that's just so inspiring to me. I love how accessible and welcoming transformative knowledge has become. Also passages of this book read like beautiful poems.]

"I have to do some work to disrupt the violent colonizing languages of almost all the texts in which I have accessed information about marine mammals and their lives, and families and super-powers and struggles."

"There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three."

"I wonder what it means for an ocean dolphin to swim up a river. The bottlenose has a range across the whole planet, the whole open ocean and yet sometimes they will choose the boundaries and specificity of a river, brackish water, narrow shores. Why?"

"And for all of you, ocean dolphins, wondering 'What am I doing in this river full of mud?' Remember why Harriet Tubman went south. She didn't have to. She was skilled, untraceable. She could have been individually free. Unencumbered. But if she wanted to tell an everlasting truth about freedom that would ring across the planet, a message for the ages, she had to live free in unfree spaces. It was the only way to bring us all with her."

"Legally and narratively, our society encourages small, isolated family units and an anti-social state reluctant to care. So care becomes the unsustainable work, the massive unpaid labor that breaks backs, hearts, and the visionary will of multitudes on a regular basis... What can we learn about the failure of the imagined ideal household? What could we learn if we cared to learn?"

"I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to beat. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection? Sometimes if I feel all my emotions in public I can't make myself speak. But sometimes I speak anyway."

"Sometimes when someone is avoiding you, they are just avoiding you. We have the right to be obscure. It is not an invitation to colonize us. It is not seduction. Boundaries can be so beautiful. Teach so much."

"The fact that you grew up not knowing that narwhals were a real animal swimming around in the Arctic right now, is not a coincidence. It is the result of a long and lucrative conspiracy. Turns out, since the Middle Ages, whalers, traders, explorers, and even chemists collaborated to hide the existence of the narwhal as a real animal, while selling their tusks as 'unicorn horns' at a huge profit."

"At just the right moment, the scholar Tavia Nyong'o reminded me that to conspire means to breathe together. Like narwhals do by the hundreds every summer. It's happening now. May we activate and renew the oldest conspiracy, remember all the thick impossible breathing before us and after us and with us, too real to be for sale. Too beautiful to be forgotten. Too magical for theft."

"I'm sure neither Moana nor the WWF are perfect, and no, I don't believe that capitalism can heal the Earth, but there is something for me to learn from this rare collaboration across these particular sectors."

"I love the way you live a layered Blackness where Black meets Black across itself as Black. How you make family out of need and tradition out of what is left and found."

"Sometimes when you love the coast enough you become shoreline. Move so steady on the floor algae grows on you. Sometimes the way you love is perfectly on time and very slow is fast enough. So keep on breathing."

[poems] homie - Danez Smith 2020

 

[I loved most of the poems in this collection. Danez Smith is such a gem. Where I've found versions of the poems online, they are hyperlinked. Sometimes they are different versions from what's printed in this collection.]

Poems: 

in lieu of a poem, i'd like to say

sometimes i wish i felt the side effects

    "you stare at fangs long enough, even fangs pink with your own blood look soft."

say it with your whole black mouth 

white niggas

what was said on the bus stop

i didn't like you when i met you

    "it was just my reflection i couldn't stand. i saw it. the way you would break me into a better me."

ii. ending with nothing

    "i counted the things used to end a boy but forgot the boy himself."

undectectable

    "i am the most important species in my body."

C.R.E.A.M.

happy hour

    "sometimes with nothing to say, just to sit on the phone & be alive together for a while"

my poems

trees!

my nig

    "there is already so much trying to end us so let it not include our hands today, let us not be dead"

acknowledgements

    "& how many times have you loved me without my asking? how often have i loved a thing because you loved it? including me"

[poems] Night sky with exit wounds - Ocean Vuong 2016

 

[I first heard of Ocean Vuong during a writing group where we read "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong". After reading that, I watched some video interviews and was so inspired by how he talks about his family and what it means to be an Asian American artist. Here are some my favorite poems and lines from Nigh sky with exit wounds.]

Poems: 

A Little Closer to the Edge

Headfirst

    "But only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart."

Seventh Circle of Earth 

    "Don't we touch each other just to prove we are still here?"

Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952

Prayer for the Newly Damned

Logophobia

Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong 

[quotes] Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler 1993

 

[I found this book through reading adrienne maree brown's work. Through that, I found out about Afrofuturism as a genre. Looking forward to read more books by Octavia Butler. She was from Los Angeles and wrote books on the bus! That's rad. There's a makerspace in the Los Angeles Central Library named after her.]

All that you touch 

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you. 

The only lasting truth 

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

"I've never felt that I was making any of this up - not the name, Earthseed, not any of it. I mean, I've never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. I wish I could believe it was all supernatural, and that I'm getting messages from God. But then, I don't believe in that kind of God. All I do is observe and take notes, trying to put things down in ways that are powerful, as simple, and as direct as I feel them. I can never do that. I keep trying, but I can't. I'm not good enough as a writer or poet or whatever it is I need to be. I don't know what to do about that. It drives me frantic sometimes. I'm getting better, but so slowly."

"We'll adapt. We'll have to. God is Change. Strange how much it helps me to remember that."

"'That isn't what God is for, but there are times when that's what prayer is for. And there are times when that's what these verses are for. God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But there's hope in understanding the nature of God - not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There's comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There's power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there's no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that. You knew it when you took your family and got the hell out of your boss's house. God will shape us all every day of our lives. Best to understand that and return the effort: Shape God.'"

[quotes] call me by your name - Andre Aciman 2007

 

[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."