Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

Forgetting is as integral to memory as death is to life.

Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.

The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform.

I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversation with many pauses, pauses replacing words. An Unnecessary Woman

Henri Matisse once said, "It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

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.

We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off.

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

How can she tell the difference between freedom and unburdening?

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.

Among the many definitions of progress, "enemy of trees" and "killer of birds" seem to me the most apt.

What happened to all those leading men of the great bacchanalia? They either died of AIDS or accepted roles as supporting actors in the middlebrow drama series of hetero culture-you know, if they're to kiss, we must have sunsets in the background. Once they were proud to explore every crevice of life in the margins, now their ambition is just to get along. Color me unimpressed.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

Neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor surrendering, until the sun finished its daily pilgrimage, for no day is so long that it is not ended by nightfall.

I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days. After

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

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.

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

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

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

Does reliability reinforce your illusion of control? If so, I wonder if in developed countries (I won't use the hateful term civilized), the treacherous, illusion-crushing process of aging is more difficult to bear. Am I having an easier time than women my age in London? Marie-Thérèse

Fate's schedule is not always naked and clear.

If I happen to come across a garden these days, I burst into bloom.

You wanted people's stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.