Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it serves no purpose. It's a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

you can tell how well a marriage is working by counting the bite marks on each partner's tongue.

At the heart of most antagonisms are irreconcilable similarities. Hundred-year wars were fought over whether Jesus was human in divine form or divine in human form. Belief is murderous. After

Nessuna perdita viene avvertita più profondamente della perdita di ciò che sarebbe potuto essere. Nessuna nostalgia fa male quanto la nostalgia per le cose che non sono mai esistite.

Saint Francis de Salle, not the real Saint Francis with the cute birds and animals, wrote that in his book Introduction to the Devout Life, which talked about how bad sex was in four large volumes. It earned Francis here a sainthood. All I can say is, I am glad I'm not Christian. For us Muslims, we just stone adulterers to death, which is much more humane than guilt.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions, as if that's possible, as if life works that way. I've read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I'm always supposed to infer causality.

Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.

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

Hope is forgivable when you're young, isn't it? With no suspicion of irony, without a soupçon of cynicism, hope lures with its siren song.

I'd dismembered it in my memories. I'd disremembered it.

Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe.

Peaks cannot exist without valleys.

My mind becomes congested, jammed with feelings and thoughts that I can't formulate nimbly enough.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology.

Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote - dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper's boot stomps.

You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society.

You've been gone for decades, you hid deep in my lakes, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood is this?

The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial.

Pundits these days keep jabbering and hooting about the Internet being the greatest advancement. Web this, web that, and let the resident spider suck the life out of you.

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

From my village I see as much of the universe as you can see from earth, So my village is as big as any other land For I am the size of what I see, Not the size of my height. —Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

Satan said, You are a temp in life.