Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

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

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.

Passion was the antithesis of morality.

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.

No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been.

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

My patience, like my time in this world, grows shorter.

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

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

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.

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

Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just died, your companion has abandoned you, but don't you dare make an inappropriate sound, because your family is around. No one to touch you the way he did, no one to understand you, no one to hug you to sleep, but don't dare allow your face to show a glint of grief. The cutting pain of feeling alone amid loved ones.

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.

I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.

Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You're an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you.

Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.

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

In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.

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

Joy is the anticipation of joy.

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.

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

Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.

Noah, however, was a son of a bitch of a captain who ran a very tight ship. Only pairs of the best and the brightest were allowed to climb the plank—perpetuate the species, repopulate the planet, and all that Nazi nonsense. Would Noah have allowed a lesbian zebra aboard, an unmarried hedgehog, a limping lemur?