Top 90 Rabih Alameddine Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.”

— Rabih Alameddine

2. “Joy is the anticipation of joy.”

— Rabih Alameddine

3. “The cure for loneliness is solitude. – Marianne Moore, from the essay “If I Were Sixteen Today.”

— Rabih Alameddine

4. “I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.”

— Rabih Alameddine

5. “I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.”

— Rabih Alameddine

6. “Mirror mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all.”

— Rabih Alameddine

7. “The eye always fills in the imperfections.”

— Rabih Alameddine

8. “Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”

— Rabih Alameddine

9. “The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.”

— Rabih Alameddine

10. “From my village I see as much of the universe as you can see from earth, So my village is as big as any other land For I am the size of what I see, Not the size of my height. – Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep.”

— Rabih Alameddine

11. “I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.”

— Rabih Alameddine

12. “My mind becomes congested, jammed with feelings and thoughts that I can’t formulate nimbly enough.”

— Rabih Alameddine

13. “I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That’s how much I loved you. That’s how much.”

— Rabih Alameddine

14. “I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?”

— Rabih Alameddine

15. “In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.”

— Rabih Alameddine

16. “I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.”

— Rabih Alameddine

17. “Forgetting is as integral to memory as death is to life.”

— Rabih Alameddine

18. “Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You’re an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you.”

— Rabih Alameddine

19. “Most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t or by our lack of choices, for that matter.”

— Rabih Alameddine

20. “I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.”

— Rabih Alameddine

21. “I am my family’s appendix, its unnecessary appendage.”

— Rabih Alameddine

22. “She can be ornery now and then, vain for sure, petulant and impetuous, silly at times, ill disposed toward the help, even malicious and malevolent when angry, but, still, she has always been the one for me.”

— Rabih Alameddine

23. “By remaining constrained in one’s environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.”

— Rabih Alameddine

24. “The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial.”

— Rabih Alameddine

25. “Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.”

— Rabih Alameddine

26. “At the heart of most antagonisms are irreconcilable similarities. Hundred-year wars were fought over whether Jesus was human in divine form or divine in human form. Belief is murderous.”

— Rabih Alameddine

27. “Joy is the anticipation of joy. Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan.”

— Rabih Alameddine

28. “There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don’t.”

— Rabih Alameddine

29. “Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.”

— Rabih Alameddine

30. “Translation is so important. The new American translations of the Bible sound like a Judith Krantz novel.”

— Rabih Alameddine

31. “Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”

— Rabih Alameddine

32. “I thought I’d be reading a new book today, but it doesn’t feel right, or I don’t feel like it. Some days are not new-book days. After.”

— Rabih Alameddine

33. “Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.”

— Rabih Alameddine

34. “Among the many definitions of progress, “enemy of trees” and “killer of birds” seem to me the most apt.”

— Rabih Alameddine

35. “The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform.”

— Rabih Alameddine

36. “Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wingenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.”

— Rabih Alameddine

37. “Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.”

— Rabih Alameddine

38. “Pundits these days keep jabbering and hooting about the Internet being the greatest advancement. Web this, web that, and let the resident spider suck the life out of you.”

— Rabih Alameddine

39. “No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.”

— Rabih Alameddine

40. “How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?”

— Rabih Alameddine

41. “Cioran once said that “one touch of clearsightedness reduces us to our primary state: nakedness.”

— Rabih Alameddine

42. “Once upon a time there was an island visited by ruin and inhabited by strange peccant creatures. “It’s a sad place,” I say, “and too much like my own life.” He nods. “You mean, the losing struggle against inscrutable blind forces, young dreams brought to ruin.” “Yes,” I tell Coover, “my young dreams are gone. I lost the struggle a long, long time ago.”

— Rabih Alameddine

43. “Later, much later, as an adult woman, she wrote of her need to be loved, to be desired, as a ravenous monster with an exigent appetite living in a black hole within. Whatever love was thrown her way, the monster devoured it and left her with nothing.”

— Rabih Alameddine

44. “If I happen to come across a garden these days, I burst into bloom.”

— Rabih Alameddine

45. “What happened to all those leading men of the great bacchanalia? They either died of AIDS or accepted roles as supporting actors in the middlebrow drama series of hetero culture-you know, if they’re to kiss, we must have sunsets in the background. Once they were proud to explore every crevice of life in the margins, now their ambition is just to get along. Color me unimpressed.”

— Rabih Alameddine

46. “Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany.”

— Rabih Alameddine

47. “There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.”

— Rabih Alameddine

48. “Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just died, your companion has abandoned you, but don’t you dare make an inappropriate sound, because your family is around. No one to touch you the way he did, no one to understand you, no one to hug you to sleep, but don’t dare allow your face to show a glint of grief. The cutting pain of feeling alone amid loved ones.”

— Rabih Alameddine

49. “Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.”

— Rabih Alameddine

50. “My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.”

— Rabih Alameddine