43 Quotes by Rawi Hage

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We’ve discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that’s what counts.

Miller is overrated. Ninety percent of his writing is incomprehensible, and incantation of the word cunt does not make you a sexual liberator.

Then let’s treat all these holy texts as stories, fictions, and imperfections that could excite us to tears or erections.

Everyone loves a comedy, my dear. It is divine.

I drove through the suburbs, where all the houses looked identical, one variation of another of the same thing. I said to myself, I’d rather fire myself from a cannon, pick up the shit of elephants and eat it, suffocate inside Houdini’s water tank, lie beneath the running horses, or sodomise a big cat in a cage and pay the consequences than get trapped in these suburbs of cardboard, gossip, and conformity.

Here in these circuses and carnivals we all love each other with our oddities and queernesses.

I don’t judge those who can’t dream, those who need to pierce their arms to create different worlds under their skin, because I am fortunate in the tools of my escapes.

Books were always important. I have to thank my father, he filled my life with books. He didn’t write but he always read. He was a merchant, he filled the store with cigarette smoke and his friends, all talking about books and politics. It was bad for business. He dealt in women’s clothing.

My steps were muffled. It was quiet, so quiet that I felt as if I did not walk but instead crawled in silence. The snow covered everthing and I walked above cotton, on silent carpets, on beach sand. Softness is temporary and deceiving. It gently receives you and gently expels you.