Rawi Hage Quotes

Everything about her seems to be saying, Listen, if you don't look attentively, if you don't go beyond my simplicity to detect the simmering volcano in me, you are not it.

The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there's always the farm and the cows ...

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

God created each one of us with a light inside. I've had sex with all kinds of people; every single person has a kind of beam inside that shines once they are touched properly.

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.

Never underestimate a clown with a book.

When a woman enters my house, a tunnel of books welcomes her, a carnival of heroes bounces from every corner, and I lead her straight through the welcoming applause of writers and mice.

This lesser world is all about reproduction, as you might well know. Those who cease to duplicate simply die.

What the fuck is legal in this universe? Stars eat each other, wolves eat the pigs, and Grandma fucks over Little Red Riding Hood.

We flew out of the city and we landed on the page where Moses split the sea and the Jews marched between those suspended mountains of water, hovering, humming on both sides, and the poor expelled merchants wondered if Moses knew what the fuck he was doing. What if his hand got tired and he accidentally dropped his magic cane, or got distracted by a wet desert ass, or lost his sandals, or what if that lush single malt of a God changed his mind again and the fucking Red Sea closed in on them with its menstrual red liquid?

And when Rambo whispered to me, assuring me of my nearest death, I was relieved at my parents' absence, for my death like all death should be a death and an end- no memory, no photograph, no stories and no mother's tears. In death everything should cease. All else is nothing but human vanity and make-believe.

There is a war out there, and believe me, Fly, it was never really between Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Crusaders and Confucius. The final battle is between those who love, respect, and liberate the body and those who hate it

There will always be a just fight and a cause to die for.

People live their lives thinking that they are forgotten, and that is why we do the most outrageous things, so as not to go unnoticed

In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.

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

The visual and the popular are essential.

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.

All those who leave immigrate to better lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matter, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk towards our chosen burials.

So long, I replied, may we all have one good flight before we rest among flowers and the orbits of hungry worms.

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.

The moon should be colonised, I thought. Mankind should seek a happier beginning, and humans should be free to stroll hand in hand regardless of their weight and orientation.

Violence and resistance are the only answer. Empire has to feel pain or it will never stop devouring you. It is only when a gun is put in a person's face that anything changes. All empires are hungry cannibals ...

I tried gambling and it never paid off, women make you suffer, and greed has no end ...

What reader or dreamer doesn't imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the time to read?

Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground.

There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian thinking.

There are two ways to taste things in life: the sweet way and the bitter way.

I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!