Cockroach Quotes

“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.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“I waited, hesitant to go out into the cold again. It was one of those days that have no mercy on your toes, that are oblivious to the suffering of your ears, that are mean and determined to take a chunk of your nose. It was a day to remind you that you can shiver all you want, sniff all you want, the universe is still oblivious. And if you ask why the inhumane temperature, the universe will answer you with tight lips and a cold tone and tell you to go back where you came from if you do not like it here.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“Besides, it will be good to show your traditions around those rich folk. Shohreh and Farhour will dance, and you will play. It will be perfect. You should entertain and extract, my friend. You should put some culture to it if you want to live and shit.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“I was stunned to realize how the change of scenery felt suddenly burdensome in the aftermath of my consumption of dead animals, alcohol, scratchy soggy lettuce, and tomatoes. And I was overwhelmed with the particular guilt of the impulsive poor who, in a moment of grandiose self-delusion, self-indulgence, and greed, want to have it all. The poor one is greedy. Greedy! Greed is the biggest stupidity. But I was filled with greed.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“They must have seen everything. They must have seen my gluttony, my conspicuous tendencies, my aloofness. I feel X-rayed, as if every bite of the fries that went down my stomach was anticipated, watched, analyzed, and bet upon. It is then that I start rushing, frantically waving my skeleton-like index finger at the waitress, and with my clacking haws insisting in the calculation of the bill, the check, the record of the meal, its price, its nutritional value, the list of ingredients sugar to sulphites, everything that keeps food conserved like Egyptian mummies, and it is then that I demand to see the little squares in the waitress’s book, squares that graded me an average, satisfactory, good, or very good customer.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“On my days of pay I am grateful, I am grateful for everything, and it shows. I am grateful for the good food, the warmth, the service, the forgotten ketchup that is relocated from a nearby table by the waitress’s own hand and offered to me. I am grateful for the waitress’s thumbs that grasp the edges of the food plates, and their palms and their wrists that juggle them all the way. And at the first sip of beer, the first fries, I forget and forgive humanity for its stupidity, its foulness, its pride, its avarice and greed, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, and anger. I forgive it for its contaminated spit, its valued feced, its rivers of piss, its bombs, all its bad dancing. I forgive it for not taking off its shoes before entering homes, before stepping on the carpets of places of worship.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“But the famine took the lives of half the population, and then the Turkish army came and confiscated the stores of grain and food. There was a boy, she remembered, who was her own age and who came every day and asked my grandmother’s mother for food. All he said was, Aunty, I am hungry. But her mother chased him away. And then my grandmother chased him away. And then one day he didn’t show up. My grandmother cried as she told this story.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“I waited, hesitant to go out into the cold again. It was one of those days that have no mercy on your toes, that are oblivious to the suffering of your eyes, that are mean and determined to take a chunk of your nose. It was a day to remind you that you can shiver all you want, sniff all you want, the universe is still oblivious. And if you ask why the inhumane temperature, the universe will answer you with tight lips and a cold tone and tell you to go back where you came from if you do not like it here.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low-sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers’ and mothers’ inheritance.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach

“I had tried many times to tell her that my suicide attempt was only my way of trying to escape the permanence of the sun. With frankness, and using my limited psychological knowledge and powers of articulation, I tried to explain to her that I had attempted suicide out of a kind of curiosity, or maybe as a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the recurring light. I felt oppressed by it all.”
― Rawi Hage, Cockroach