Quotes from Rabih Alameddine

Perfect name, the waiting room, waiting, waiting we were waiting, wait with me, Doc, wait and hope was the motto of Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, and did you know that the Spanish word for waiting and hoping is the same, so why couldn't we call this the hoping room, or would that be too depressing, why introduce our desires into the mix, who wants to be reminded of his longing?

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.

My heart had momentarily found its pestle.

Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wingenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.

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). Beirutis

Once upon a time there was an island visited by ruin and inhabited by strange peccant creatures. "It's a sad place," I say, "and too much like my own life." He nods. "You mean, the losing struggle against inscrutable blind forces, young dreams brought to ruin." "Yes," I tell Coover, "my young dreams are gone. I lost the struggle a long, long time ago.

Had I known that coffee could taste so good, I would have gotten drunk on it every day.

The platter could probably sate four starving Ethiopians into a crapulous state.

Translation is so important. The new American translations of the Bible sound like a Judith Krantz novel.

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.

When he played, though—when he played he could liquefy your soul. He walked on water—well, his fingers did—liquid supple and fluid smooth, running, dripping, flowing.

I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.

Writing one's story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

What is life if not a habitation to loss?

We invade your countries, destroy your economies, demolish your infrastructures, murder hundreds of thousands of your citizens, and a decade or so later, we write beautifully restrained novels about how killing you made us cry.

You have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.

Throughout our marriage, we would go for weeks without exchanging more than perfunctory communications, sharing little but the bewildered quiet. And you think that I am lonely now? Heavens. I wish I'd listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: "If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

My books show me what it's like to live in a reliable country where you flick on a switch and a bulb is guaranteed to shine and remain on, where you know that cars will stop at red lights and those traffic lights will not cease working a couple of times a day. How does it feel when a plumber shows up at the designated time, when he shows up at all? How does it feel to assume that when someone says she'll do something by a certain date, she in fact does it?

She also taught me how to pray, another discipline I didn't keep up with. In the beginning I was too busy, what with housework, cooking, and educating myself. I had little time for a god who had little time for me. As I matured, I had no use for one. Emmanuel Lévinas suggested that God left in 1941. Mine left in 1975. And in 1978, and in 1982, and in 1990.

My voice had no home until her.

Death is the only vantage point from which a life can be truly measured.

I feel at home in my rituals.

It's just that our memories are rarely where we think they are.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.