Rabih Alameddine Quotes

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw m...

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what hap...

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, li...

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

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

Neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor ...

I want a God that makes me twirl.' I jumped off the couch. I untucked and unbuttoned my shirt so it ...

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

You looked inhuman when you were dying, Doc, your eyes glistened like dimming stars, you were wastin...

I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wishe...

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, t...

On Lou's lips a trace of pinot and out of them poured tales of acts of viciousness worthy of the gre...

...I wondered at times whether I would wake up and this would be just a bad dream, a nightmare that ...

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal s...

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

Passion was the antithesis of morality.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a d...

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

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the rel...

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being o...

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

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak t...

We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have...

Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just...

Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting...

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama...

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see my...

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I ...

I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude ...

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

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

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

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

In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of...

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I ...

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the w...

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

I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to b...

In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, ...

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

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

Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according ...

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an...

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

Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introdu...

Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends wi...

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