Rabih Alameddine quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rabih Alameddine on Wise Famous Quotes.

A game of soccer induces more than enjoyment, more than entertainment.

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

Of course, the pile grows and grows until I decide that I'm not going to buy a single book until I read my stack. Sometimes that works.

My father loved Brazilian football, a diehard follower, so of course, he hated Germany and always rooted against them, always.

I loved problems on paper, and I was good at math, but I was a mechanical engineer, and I never understood - or cared to - how a car worked.

I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.

I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.

If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God.

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

Soccer is the most widely played sport in the U.S.

The presence of another person - of any person whatsoever - makes me feel awkward,

Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.

Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

Passion was the antithesis of morality.

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

In reality, the only true model of a successful woman was the Divine Sarah.

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

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

Satan said, You are a temp in life.

We are all children when we sleep.

Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.

The story of the king is the story of the people, and unfortunately, to this day, no king has learned that lesson.

Peaks cannot exist without valleys.

I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.

Belief is the enemy of a storyteller

Whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am momentarily shocked out of the narrative.

I always assumed that everyone knew no country would ever be awarded a World Cup without pricey gifts exchanging hands under the tables.

In 1982, Algeria made their first appearance at the World Cup. I believe it was the first Arab country to do so.

Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.

In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.

There are a few places on the East Coast, and maybe Los Angeles, where women understand evening gowns. The rest of the country still has far to go.

How can she tell the difference between freedom and unburdening?

Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain.

I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

No, I might be able to poke fun at the Quran for its childishly imperious content, but not for its style.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

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.

I am my family's appendix, it's unnecessary appendage. - Aaliya

If I happen to come across a garden these days, I burst into bloom.

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

He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us. (p. 70)

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

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

Hope, the great deceiver, seduced her that morning.

Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it's part of who I am.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.

I'm a failed narcissist.

Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

Homophobia is rampant in soccer, probably more so than in any other sport. I'm not sure why.

I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.

Nobody ever said I'm a simple personality.

I can easily hold two opposing beliefs at the same time without any problem, which I find - well, mind-expanding, really.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.

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. After

A team without hope fizzles: no flameout, no fire.

Yes, I am a tad obsessive. For a nonreligious woman, this is my faith.

Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-
a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.

You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

Fate's schedule is not always naked and clear.

The eye always fills in the imperfections.

She was socially inept, an affliction I am quite intimate with.

My patience, like my time in this world, grows shorter.

I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.

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.

I am a functioning human being. Mostly. Just so you don't make too much fun of me, the mostly above refers to functioning, not to human being.

Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.

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

The relationship between France and its 'foreign' players - blacks and North African Arabs - has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.

The reasons why a player is better on one club than on another are many. I certainly am not an expert and can't explain.

I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.

No snake is as venomous as wounded privilege.

No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism.

Among the many definitions of progress, "enemy of trees" and "killer of birds" seem to me the most apt.

Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.

I gave up on the delusion that these players enjoy soccer as much as I do, that they play for the love of the game.

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

Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

One of the things I enjoy most during the World Cup is watching a team improve, mature, and gel during the course of the tournament.

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.

To write is to know that you are not at home.

I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.

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

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.

No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed. I

Her appearance has changed as well, and I don't mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life.

One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.

When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

If you want to know whether soccer is big in America, pick a weekend, go to any park in the land, and pay attention. We're there. We've always been.