Home > Author > Rabih Alameddine
41 " You looked inhuman when you were dying, Doc, your eyes glistened like dimming stars, you were wasting away and life was leaving you piecemeal, your soul no longer fit your body, you hated it and I hated it and I couldn't recognize you and I couldn't see you and I was frightened and I never knew what to do, I looked for the man I love in you and I searched for who I used to be around you and I couldn't find either. "
― Rabih Alameddine , The Angel of History
42 " 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. "
― Rabih Alameddine , An Unnecessary Woman
43 " I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality. "
― Rabih Alameddine , Koolaids: The Art of War
44 " I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself. "
― Rabih Alameddine , I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters
45 " I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies. "
― Rabih Alameddine
46 " I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life. "
47 " What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity? "
48 " In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery. "
49 " Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose was flowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukulele "
50 " How can she tell the difference between freedom and unburdening? "
51 " Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wingenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family. "
52 " Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You're an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you. "
53 " Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children’s picture book. "
54 " Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can? "
55 " In Beirut, death’s unremitting light shines bright for all to see, brighter than the Mediterranean sun, brighter than the night’s Russian missiles, brighter than a baby’s smile. "
56 " In reality, the only true model of a successful woman was the Divine Sarah. "
57 " 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. "
58 " We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you. "
59 " No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed. "
60 " I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That's how much I loved you. That's how much. "