Quotes from Rawi Hage

There are two ways to taste things in life: the sweet way and the bitter way.

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We've discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that's what counts.

I would argue that our libertine ways are better suited than any religion to protect man's core against the devastating and tragic reality of life.

What reader or dreamer doesn't imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the time to read?

We worship fire because it is the closest sensation to what a man feels when love exists. Fire is a passage and a dance, but its destruction brings renewal.

It's all just a dance, Pavlov thought. And nothing is more devastating than a dance

There is no dignity for the dead. There are only ceremonies for the living

I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!

I had tried many times to tell her that my suicide attempt was only my way of trying to escape the permanence of the sun. With frankness, and using my limited psychological knowledge and powers of articulation, I tried to explain to her that I had attempted suicide out of a kind of curiosity, or maybe as a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the recurring light. I felt oppressed by it all.

I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low-sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers' and mothers' inheritance.

But the famine took the lives of half the population, and then the Turkish army came and confiscated the stores of grain and food. There was a boy, she remembered, who was her own age and who came every day and asked my grandmother's mother for food. All he said was, Aunty, I am hungry. But her mother chased him away. And then my grandmother chased him away. And then one day he didn't show up. My grandmother cried as she told this story.

Besides, it will be good to show your traditions around those rich folk. Shohreh and Farhour will dance, and you will play. It will be perfect. You should entertain and extract, my friend. You should put some culture to it if you want to live and shit.

I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers' and mothers' inheritances.

Suicide, the dog continued, is the most heroic act, which no animal save for man dares to commit or could ever contemplate.

We no longer belong here, we are mutants, and our only choice is to become even more mutant so that we eventually leave and disappear from this region. We are nothing now but the residue of a defeated, conquered past and we are stubbornly holding on to old creeds, a few archaic rituals and the facade of western modernity.

This lesser world is all about reproduction, as you might well know. Those who cease to duplicate simply die.

Then let's treat all these holy texts as stories, fictions, and imperfections that could excite us to tears or erections.

There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian thinking.

Violence and resistance are the only answer. Empire has to feel pain or it will never stop devouring you. It is only when a gun is put in a person's face that anything changes

Communists and Muslims are not the enemies to fear in this land, Fly. It is the food consumption that will eventually blow up in everyone's faces.

I tried gambling and it never paid off, women make you suffer, and greed has no end...

In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.

Nothing to be proud of, nothing to regret.

Miller is overrated. Ninety percent of his writing is incomprehensible, and incantation of the word cunt does not make you a sexual liberator.