Call Me by Your Name

“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. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”

“Is it better to speak or die?”

“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”

"You'll kill me if you stop."

“Every time I go back to Rome, I go back to that one spot. It is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by Poe still throbbed under the ancient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have.”

There's nothing more to say than this. I could quote this entire book because each sentence, each word, each dialogue is filled with so much truth and pain and something quite indescribable. Who ever said first love isn't devastating and powerful? I didn't believe it myself until I read this book.

The movie adaptation of this book is going to compete at the Oscars. I read the book while it was still quite unknown - I was young, perhaps too young for the themes in this novel (not the homosexuality or bisexuality of the characters but the heavy realizations and questions about life and death). It hasn't quite left me, even years after I first laid my eyes upon it. Sometimes you meet people and then you think, yes, this is it, this person is going to be at my side for a while. I experienced the same thing with this book. It never leaves me and it will change your perspective on many things if you do decide to read it. I am not the same person I was before reading it and I wish more people would know about this masterpiece.