Top 100 Rabih Quotes
#1. A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate. Rabih
Alain De Botton
#2. peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life. Rabih
Alain De Botton
#3. 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)
Rabih Alameddine
#4. If I happen to come across a garden these days, I burst into bloom.
Rabih Alameddine
#7. Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.
Rabih Alameddine
#9. 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
Rabih Alameddine
#10. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#11. When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.
Rabih Alameddine
#12. 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
#13. 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%.
Rabih Alameddine
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#21. I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.
Rabih Alameddine
#23. When he played, though - when he played he could liquefy your soul. He walked on water - well, his fingers did - liquid supple and fluid smooth, running, dripping, flowing.
Rabih Alameddine
#24. Among the many definitions of progress, "enemy of trees" and "killer of birds" seem to me the most apt.
Rabih Alameddine
#25. I know many sports fans that don't enjoy soccer. The argument is that there's no action, not enough of it.
Rabih Alameddine
#27. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#28. In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.
Rabih Alameddine
#29. If you want to know whether soccer is big in America, pick a weekend, go to any park in the land, and pay attention. We're there. We've always been.
Rabih Alameddine
#30. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#31. Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.
Rabih Alameddine
#32. The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial.
Rabih Alameddine
#33. I've never had a problem finding a team, a league, or a pickup game. Actually, I'm not sure I want soccer to get bigger. We have so many teams in San Francisco that there aren't enough fields.
Rabih Alameddine
#34. Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.
Rabih Alameddine
#35. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.
Rabih Alameddine
#36. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#37. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#38. Beirut has survived for thousands and thousands of years by spreading her beautiful legs for every army within smelling distance.
Rabih Alameddine
#39. No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.
Rabih Alameddine
#40. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#41. The story of the king is the story of the people, and unfortunately, to this day, no king has learned that lesson.
Rabih Alameddine
#42. Her appearance has changed as well, and I don't mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life.
Rabih Alameddine
#43. A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.
Rabih Alameddine
#44. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#45. I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.
Rabih Alameddine
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#50. I always assumed that everyone knew no country would ever be awarded a World Cup without pricey gifts exchanging hands under the tables.
Rabih Alameddine
#51. Homophobia is rampant in soccer, probably more so than in any other sport. I'm not sure why.
Rabih Alameddine
#52. I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.
Rabih Alameddine
#53. 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. (p. 5)
Rabih Alameddine
#54. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#55. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#56. What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?
Rabih Alameddine
#57. 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
#58. He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us. (p. 70)
Rabih Alameddine
#60. In 1982, Algeria made their first appearance at the World Cup. I believe it was the first Arab country to do so.
Rabih Alameddine
#61. How can she tell the difference between freedom and unburdening?
Rabih Alameddine
#62. No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed. I
Rabih Alameddine
#65. I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.
Rabih Alameddine
#66. I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.
Rabih Alameddine
#68. Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.
Rabih Alameddine
#69. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#70. As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.
Rabih Alameddine
#71. I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.
Rabih Alameddine
#72. We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Rabih Alameddine
#73. Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.
Rabih Alameddine
#74. I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.
Rabih Alameddine
#75. My father and I rarely saw eye to eye when I was growing up. We saw the world differently. It was only when we were both adults that we were able to share spectacles. However, football, and particularly the World Cup, was when we, enemy combatants, could traverse trenches and be together.
Rabih Alameddine
#76. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#77. She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.
Rabih Alameddine
#78. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?
Rabih Alameddine
#79. I gave up on the delusion that these players enjoy soccer as much as I do, that they play for the love of the game.
Rabih Alameddine
#80. 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
#81. I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.
Rabih Alameddine
#82. Now I love hoops. I'm a diehard UCLA fan, have been since my freshman year. But basketball is the '1812 Overture.' Pomp and circumstance, fireworks and cannons, lots and lots of fun, and in the end, still Tchaikovsky.
Rabih Alameddine
#83. Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.
Rabih Alameddine
#84. I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.
Rabih Alameddine
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Rabih Alameddine
#87. '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.
Rabih Alameddine
#88. 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
Rabih Alameddine
#89. 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
#90. I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.
Rabih Alameddine
#91. Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.
Rabih Alameddine
#92. Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.
Rabih Alameddine
#95. I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
Rabih Alameddine
#97. One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.
Rabih Alameddine
#98. A game of soccer induces more than enjoyment, more than entertainment.
Rabih Alameddine
#99. No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism.
Rabih Alameddine
#100. In reality, the only true model of a successful woman was the Divine Sarah.
Rabih Alameddine
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