Rabih Alameddine Quotes

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

People are the story they tell themselves.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

The tales we tell ourselves about ourselves makes us who we are.

The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked, the right way and the way that was not so right.

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

I've basically thought of myself as a writer, whether I was or not.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not convincing as an American.

To me, it's really not about how I look - it's about who I can be. It is my job to bring the character to life and my duty to fit into the jigsaw in that story.

It is important to me that people believe in me as a model, trust in me as a model - which they do in London and New York - which is why sometimes I think I'm an Anglo-Saxon woman at heart.

If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.

We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

We're all the stories we tell ourselves.

As we grow up, we're constantly defining ourselves. In my case: Caucasian, male, born in Iowa, live in Boston, Zen Buddhist, good at learning languages. With countless labels, I build up this creation I call my self.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

I've never felt more American than I did when I moved to England. It becomes a real kind of part of your identity: "Oh, Ben. He's the American guy." I think when you say you're from New York you get a different reception then if you just say, "I'm American." So I'd always kind of make sure I was a New Yorker first.

Don't confuse who you are with the results that you produce.