Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.
How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?
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.
I want a God that makes me twirl.’ I jumped off the couch. I untucked and unbuttoned my shirt so it would flow like a robe. ‘Like this. I can do this for God.’ I held my hands out. I twirled and twirled and twirled. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look.
You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.
Neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor surrendering, until the sun finished its daily pilgrimage, for no day is so long that it is not ended by nightfall.
…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.
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 for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.
I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?
She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.
I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.
She felt the intimate loss of who was meant to become.
I realised when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one.
I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.
The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.
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.
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 own.
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.
He may be my half brother, but we’re not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.
No matter how good a story is, there is more at stake in the telling.
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 matter how inappropriate he is.
…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 and you all would be healthy and alive.
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.
I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.
I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.
I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies.
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.
What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?
I know many sports fans that don’t enjoy soccer. The argument is that there’s no action, not enough of it.
In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, modernity, tradition, East and West – which allows for a kind of intellectual development not available anywhere else.