Carnival 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.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“We are all the products and victims of our own upbringing, until we reflect, refuse, and rebel.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

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

“There will always be a just fight and a cause to die for.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“Here in these circuses and carnivals we all love each other with our oddities and queernesses.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“Poor Mary. They married her to Jesus, and Jesus is an asexual circumcised revolutionary. What future is there to be had in that scenario?”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“Jazz and vodka, the fuel of resistance.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“Never underestimate a clown with a book.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“So long, I replied, may we all have one good flight before we rest among flowers and the orbits of hungry worms.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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...”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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?”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“What do the stars believe in, Zainab? Where do the dead horses go, what do the birds worship, and what do the rivers live for?”
― Rawi Hage , Carnival

“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?”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“There are two ways to taste things in life: the sweet way and the bitter way.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“Everyone loves a comedy, my dear. It is divine.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“These two, I thought, are no rebels; it is obvious that they have never been on the barricades of protesters and revolutionaries, they have never waved flags through the tear gas of a nation state. They have never charged with stones and sticks to break down the fences that protect the men in suits, the diggers of gold beneath the indigenous's soil, the oil thieves in boardrooms and the politicians behind citadel walls. The first rule of resistance is to keep you eyes open and protect your nose from the smell of defeat when the waft of power comes to separate you from your brothers-in-arms.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“I tried gambling and it never paid off, women make you suffer, and greed has no end...”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“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...”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser.
Well, let’s talk Algeria then. Let’s talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival