A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
Harat’ is actually – it’s a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from ‘the mapmaker,’ somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
I always say show me a storyteller who doesn’t embellish, and I’ll show you a bad one. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
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. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it’s part of who I am. Rabih Alameddine Read Quote
