Rabih Alameddine Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

Rabih Alameddine
Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

Rabih Alameddine
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?

Rabih Alameddine
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.

Rabih Alameddine
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.

Rabih Alameddine
By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

Rabih Alameddine
I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

Rabih Alameddine