Rabih Alameddine Quotes

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?

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

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

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

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.

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

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.

For someone like me and my generation, you had to speak French to be sophisticated, you had to be lighter-skinned.

I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

I know many sports fans that don't enjoy soccer. The argument is that there's no action, not enough of it.

I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.

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.

I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.

Passion was the antithesis of morality.

She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.

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.

I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.

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

He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.

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

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

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.

She felt the intimate loss of who was meant to become.

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

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

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.