Quotes by Rabih Alameddine

“Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.”

“In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts.”

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

“Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just died, your companion has abandoned you, but don't you dare make an inappropriate sound, because ...”

“I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.”

“Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put t...”

“I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their ...”

“On Lou's lips a trace of pinot and out of them poured tales of acts of viciousness worthy of the great Lucifer himself, stories told through the night, the tortures, the beatings, the broken bones,...”

“I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.”

“There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.”

“We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.”

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

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

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

“By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes acrosseach incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clipis a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a...”

“Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing. Now, mind ...”

“He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.”

“Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden.She'll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no...”

“...I wondered at times whether I would wake up and this would be just a bad dream, a nightmare that I could wish away, I had the same fantasy when you were sick, Doc, that I would one day wake up a...”

“The eye always fills in the imperfections.”