Quotes from Rawi Hage

The visual and the popular are essential.

Death makes one forgive and love again. We humans only value our losses and regrets.

I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser. Well, let's talk Algeria then. Let's talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.

And no one was left to walk behind that coffin but three old women who quietly, timidly, beneath the black veils covering their transitory old faces, mourned the end of a lineage and the inevitability of extinction.

There is no God, there are only humans who imagine the possibility of gods.

The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there's always the farm and the cows...

He saw that women, in gathering close to death, were in these times of mourning the producers of a most unique symphony, a collective weeping that had evolved into one of mankind's most sophisticated chants.

We only kill each other to see ourselves as heroes in our fathers' stories.