Words matter. These are the best Rabih Alameddine Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
I couldn’t tell the truth if my life depended on it.
No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism.
Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it’s part of who I am.
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.
I know many sports fans that don’t enjoy soccer. The argument is that there’s no action, not enough of it.
I have to admit, I’m not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.
I can make up stories with the best of them. I’ve been telling stories since I was a little kid.
The relationship between France and its ‘foreign’ players – blacks and North African Arabs – has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.
A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance – this peak of ecstasy.
My father loved Brazilian football, a diehard follower, so of course, he hated Germany and always rooted against them, always.
Close friends consider me a literary snob.
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.
I always say show me a storyteller who doesn’t embellish, and I’ll show you a bad one.
I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or – well, you get the idea.
A team without hope fizzles: no flameout, no fire.
I always assumed that everyone knew no country would ever be awarded a World Cup without pricey gifts exchanging hands under the tables.
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.
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.
All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.
Homophobia is rampant in soccer, probably more so than in any other sport. I’m not sure why.
Nobody ever said I’m a simple personality.
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.
Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.
