Rabih Alameddine Quotes
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I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.
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I was gay before I began to play soccer over 40 years ago. It's been 28 years since a friend and I organized one of the first gay soccer teams in the world.
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Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.
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I know many sports fans that don't enjoy soccer. The argument is that there's no action, not enough of it.
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As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.
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I think I'm being conservative when I say there are more people playing soccer in the United States than in 90% of the world's other countries, probably 95%.
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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.
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In 1982, Algeria made their first appearance at the World Cup. I believe it was the first Arab country to do so.
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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.
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Nobody ever said I'm a simple personality.
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A player should be disparaged if he gives less than his all, if he doesn't give 100%, no matter what shirt he's wearing. Whether it's your national team, your club, or little league. Yes, there are friendly matches, recreational ones, and so on, but sport in its essence is about giving your best.
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I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.
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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.
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In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.
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My father and I rarely saw eye to eye when I was growing up. We saw the world differently. It was only when we were both adults that we were able to share spectacles. However, football, and particularly the World Cup, was when we, enemy combatants, could traverse trenches and be together.
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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.
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By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.
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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?
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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.
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Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school […]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. […]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.
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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?
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The whole world is going insane right now. We, too, have our own problems. The president of Lebanon is an arch-menace. But I think, as horrid as he is - and he is absolutely insane - he's still more sane than Trump, so that tells me a lot.
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...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.
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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.