Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?

Beginnings are pregnant with possibilities.

When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life? If that's the case, why do Americans always behave as if they're victims?

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina writes: "Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it's the people who stayed who can't remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they're the one who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

am alone. It is a choice I've made, yet it is also a choice made with few other options available. Beiruti society wasn't fond of divorced, childless women in those days. Still, I made my bed—a simple, comfortable, and adequate bed, I might add.

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

Rarely was Arabic used for physics, chemistry, or mathematics in any of the schools of Beirut, whose main curriculum has always been community conformity. It seems that Arabic is not considered a language for logic. A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.

The girl strolled past, indifferently, seductively, her eyes hidden by cheap sunglasses. The old man sat up when the girl passed him. "Don't you think your pants are too tight?" he asked. "Kiss my ass, Uncle," she replied. He leaned forward. She kept going. "No one listens anymore," he said quietly.

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

From Pessoa: "Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me.

I am my family's appendix, its unnecessary appendage. -Aaliya

In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent.

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

Los libros en sí mismos casi nunca son aburridos, excepto las memorias de los presidentes de Estados Unidos (no, no, Nixon); o mejor dicho, las memorias de los estadounidenses en general. Es el síndrome «Vivo en el país más rico del mundo, pero compadeceos de mí porque de joven tenía los pies planos y una vagina maloliente, pero al final he triunfado». ¡Puaj! Libros

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

You never believed in God, Doc, did you? You said if God created man in His image, why couldn't man invent a God that was more anthropomorphic, less gratuitously remote, who, like his enemy, Satan, resembled us?

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

and Satan said, This is not possession, if it were, you would do what I tell you and not refuse my counsel, for I am no creature of mere light, I am of fire born, fire of fire, the blood in the veins of the world is lit up by my flame, I am life's primal force, you are the child at the end of the diving board afraid to jump into the pool...

In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege of another age on rampartless Beirut, cutting off the water supply and food shipments, the modern catapults, the air force, leveled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure, and, amazingly, bombed the synagogue of Beirut's Jewish neighborhood. There is no contradiction.

I'm not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.

Adrenaline rushed through my veins, anarchic, atavistic, delicious, a sheen of sweat on my palms, tingles on my forearms, rage in my voice.

America entered the Lebanese Civil War. It paid the price. Two hundred marines were killed by one Shiite. Reagan pulled the troops and avoided discussing Lebanon. Lebanon, like AIDS, was hardly ever mentioned by our president.

Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy.