Top 90 Rabih Alameddine Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “I am a functioning human being. Mostly. Just so you don’t make too much fun of me, the mostly above refers to functioning, not to human being.”

— Rabih Alameddine

52. “But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.”

— Rabih Alameddine

53. “Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass – an hourglass that drains grain by grain.”

— Rabih Alameddine

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

— Rabih Alameddine

55. “I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?”

— Rabih Alameddine

56. “What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?”

— Rabih Alameddine

57. “Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.”

— Rabih Alameddine

58. “Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?”

— Rabih Alameddine

59. “I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.”

— Rabih Alameddine

60. “She made an appearance to offer me courage, and I worried about her appearance. Shame. Such a worrywart I am. I miss miracles blooming before my eyes: I concentrate on a fading star and miss the constellation. I overlook dazzling thunderstorms worrying whether I have laundry hanging.”

— Rabih Alameddine

61. “My patience, like my time in this world, grows shorter.”

— Rabih Alameddine

62. “Peaks cannot exist without valleys.”

— Rabih Alameddine

63. “Fate’s schedule is not always naked and clear.”

— Rabih Alameddine

64. “Satan said, You are a temp in life.”

— Rabih Alameddine

65. “Passion was the antithesis of morality.”

— Rabih Alameddine

66. “Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic literature, the dominance of panegyrics and eulogies as an art form, etc.”

— Rabih Alameddine

67. “I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.”

— Rabih Alameddine

68. “To write is to know that you are not at home.”

— Rabih Alameddine

69. “Had I known that coffee could taste so good, I would have gotten drunk on it every day.”

— Rabih Alameddine

70. “Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.”

— Rabih Alameddine

71. “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

72. “The platter could probably sate four starving Ethiopians into a crapulous state.”

— Rabih Alameddine

73. “I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. 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

74. “I’d dismembered it in my memories. I’d disremembered it.”

— Rabih Alameddine

75. “Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology.”

— Rabih Alameddine

76. “No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been.”

— Rabih Alameddine

77. “Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote – dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps.”

— Rabih Alameddine

78. “I want a God that makes me twirl.′ I jumped off the couch. I untucked and unbuttoned my shirt so it would flow like a robe. ‘Like this. I can do this for God.’ I held my hands out. I twirled and twirled and twirled. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look.”

— Rabih Alameddine

79. “No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.”

— Rabih Alameddine

80. “Of course, the pile grows and grows until I decide that I’m not going to buy a single book until I read my stack. Sometimes that works.”

— Rabih Alameddine

81. “I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.”

— Rabih Alameddine

82. “One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.”

— Rabih Alameddine

83. “I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.”

— Rabih Alameddine

84. “I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversation with many pauses, pauses replacing words. An Unnecessary Woman.”

— Rabih Alameddine

85. “Neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor surrendering, until the sun finished its daily pilgrimage, for no day is so long that it is not ended by nightfall.”

— Rabih Alameddine

86. “We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off.”

— Rabih Alameddine

87. “You’ve been gone for decades, you hid deep in my lakes, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood is this?”

— Rabih Alameddine

88. “My heart had momentarily found its pestle.”

— Rabih Alameddine

89. “You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you’ll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.”

— Rabih Alameddine

90. “You wanted people’s stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.”

— Rabih Alameddine

91. “Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe.”

— Rabih Alameddine

92. “You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society.”

— Rabih Alameddine