Rabih Alameddine Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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. (p. 22)

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

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#3. Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.

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

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#5. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

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#6. There are a few places on the East Coast, and maybe Los Angeles, where women understand evening gowns. The rest of the country still has far to go.

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#7. When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

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#8. I think I'm being conservative when I say there are more people playing soccer in the United States than in 90% of the world's other countries, probably 95%.

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#9. I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.

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#10. 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?

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#11. 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.

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#12. For me, soccer was a dance.

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#13. I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.

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#14. Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.

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#15. Among the many definitions of progress, "enemy of trees" and "killer of birds" seem to me the most apt.

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

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#17. Before prognostication, a disclaimer: I have never been able to pick a winner. Not that it has ever stopped me from trying to. Well, it has stopped me from buying stock, but let's not talk about that.

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#18. Now, please don't tell me you don't care about how you look and that there's more to you than your appearance. 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.

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#19. Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

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#20. Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.

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#21. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

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#22. All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

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#23. Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

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#24. Beirut has survived for thousands and thousands of years by spreading her beautiful legs for every army within smelling distance.

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

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#26. I was gay before I began to play soccer over 40 years ago. It's been 28 years since a friend and I organized one of the first gay soccer teams in the world.

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#27. The story of the king is the story of the people, and unfortunately, to this day, no king has learned that lesson.

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#28. Her appearance has changed as well, and I don't mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life.

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#29. In Beirut, death's unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night's Russian missiles, brighter than a baby's smile.

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#30. I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.

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#31. 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?

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#32. Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.

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#33. I always assumed that everyone knew no country would ever be awarded a World Cup without pricey gifts exchanging hands under the tables.

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#34. 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.

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#35. I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.

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

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#37. 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.

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#38. In 1982, Algeria made their first appearance at the World Cup. I believe it was the first Arab country to do so.

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#39. To write is to know that you are not at home.

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#40. A team without hope fizzles: no flameout, no fire.

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

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#42. Close friends consider me a literary snob.

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#43. Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

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#44. As much as I loved it and felt at home within its cages, school is more Hades than Heaven - a ritual killing of childhood is performed in school, children are put to death.

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#45. I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.

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#46. I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.

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#47. If you go through any culture that has had wars, go to the bomb shelters, and you'll hear some amazing stories. Yes, it's a necessary thing that we actually both distract ourselves and it's a way to bond.

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#48. 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.

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#49. I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.

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#50. 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.

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#51. The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we're Mediterranean, and timing isn't our forte.

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#52. 'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.

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#53. 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. After

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#54. I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.

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#55. Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

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#56. Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.

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#57. Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.

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#58. Passion was the antithesis of morality.

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#59. I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

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#60. A game of soccer induces more than enjoyment, more than entertainment.

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#61. No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism.

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#62. In reality, the only true model of a successful woman was the Divine Sarah.

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#63. Yes, I am a tad obsessive. For a nonreligious woman, this is my faith.

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#64. The relationship between France and its 'foreign' players - blacks and North African Arabs - has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.

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#65. I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.

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#66. I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul.
Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?
You think art has meaning. You think you're not like me.

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#67. There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

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#68. 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.

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#69. Belief is the enemy of a storyteller

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#70. In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent.

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#71. Joy is the anticipation of joy.

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

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#73. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain.

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#74. One of the things I enjoy most during the World Cup is watching a team improve, mature, and gel during the course of the tournament.

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#75. The presence of another person - of any person whatsoever - makes me feel awkward,

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#76. My father loved Brazilian football, a diehard follower, so of course, he hated Germany and always rooted against them, always.

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#77. 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.

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

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#79. My mind becomes congested, jammed with feelings and thoughts that I can't formulate nimbly enough.

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#80. A houri stroked the top of Isaac's head. "Are you truly pure?" he asked.
"We are as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches."
"How dull," Isaac replied.

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#81. I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.

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#82. When I was younger, I used to find stories about divas charming. Not much anymore.

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#83. A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.

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#84. Satan said, You are a temp in life.

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#85. 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

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#86. I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own.

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#87. I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.

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

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#89. I oscillate between being cynical and being naive on a regular basis. I always think that not much shocks me until something much too obvious does.

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#90. No snake is as venomous as wounded privilege.

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#91. Soccer is the most widely played sport in the U.S.

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#92. You can tell how well a marriage is working by counting the bite marks on each partner's tongue.

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

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#94. I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?

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#95. In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts. (p. 12)

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