Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

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

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?

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

The corpse looks to me like a suit left behind.

There are two types 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.

I believe that the choice of a first book, the book that opens your eyes and quickens your soul, is as involuntary as a first crush.

can't keep blaming her. She hasn't had any opportunities, has had to make do. She's had a tough life. But I can't seem to stop criticizing her. Whenever I gingerly remove my mother's noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

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.

I'm a failed narcissist.

Mark Twain's quote: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

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

The Gestapo officer in charge of the Jewish labor force, Felix Landau, decided that Bruno was no ordinary Jew, but a necessary one. Think on the term for a moment. What is a necessary human?

I wondered at times whether I would wake up and this would be just a bad dream, a nightmare that I could wish away, I had the same fantasy when you were sick, Doc, that I would one day wake up and you all would be healthy and alive.

We were two solitudes benefiting from a grace that was continuously reinvigorated in each other's presence, two solitudes who nourished each other.

Never has my city been welcoming of the unpaired or the impaired.

I imagine looking at the room through a stranger's eyes. Books everywhere, stacks and stacks, shelves and bookcases, stacks atop each shelf, I in the creaky chair that hasn't been reupholstered since I bought it in the early sixties. I have been its only occupant; years ago its foam molded into the shape of my posterior. The accompanying ottoman holds two stacks of books that haven't been disturbed in years, except for semiweekly dusting.

I like men and women who don't fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Alvar de Campos calls them, strangers in this place as in every other, accidental in life as in the woul. I like outsiders, phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived. David Grossman may love Israel, but he wanders its cobwebbed halls, just as his namesake Vasily wandered Russia's. To write is to know that you are not home.

I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn't dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn't dream of becoming a giant - I wasn't that delusional or arrogant - but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget.

I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah's death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like 'Books are the air I breathe,' or, worse, 'Life is meaningless without literature,' all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.

You looked inhuman when you were dying, Doc, your eyes glistened like dimming stars, you were wasting away and life was leaving you piecemeal, your soul no longer fit your body, you hated it and I hated it and I couldn't recognize you and I couldn't see you and I was frightened and I never knew what to do, I looked for the man I love in you and I searched for who I used to be around you and I couldn't find either.

My soul is fate's chew toy.

Choosing which book isn't difficult. The choice is typically the last one I brought home. I acquire books constantly and place them in the to-read pile. When I finish with whatever book I'm reading, I begin the last book I bought, the one that caught my attention last. Of course, the pile grows and grows until I decide taht I'm not going to buy a single book until I read my stack. Sometimes that works.

I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.

I lie on my side, head sunk in the pillow, waiting for first light, for the lift of the curtain, waiting for you, how your right hand used to entwine with my left in a slow dance, how our bodies fit in bed, yet you didn't show up.