Home > Author > Laila Lalami
1 " The universe had an odd sense of fairness; it took away things one did not want to give up, and then gave things one did not ask for. "
― Laila Lalami , Secret Son
2 " His anger took many shapes: sometimes soft and familiar, like a round stone he had caressed for so long that is was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside. "
3 " Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies. "
― Laila Lalami , The Moor's Account
4 " Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller. "
5 " Just by saying something was so, they believed that it was. I now know that these conquerors, like many before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it. "
― Laila Lalami
6 " My whole life has been lived in-between -- in between languages, in between cultures, in between countries ... My life resisted the kind of easy categories that the head of state had outlined for everyone. Surely, I told myself, a nation was a community, with views that are by necessity different, often divergent, and occasionally contradictory. Surely, true allegiance meant speaking up when something wasn't right. "
― Laila Lalami , Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
7 " White" is seen as the default, the absence of race. ...Whiteness, then, is shrouded in silence. To speak about it openly is to break a taboo. "
8 " A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too. "
9 " No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves. "
10 " Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember. "
― Laila Lalami , The Other Americans
11 " To overcome my fear, I shackled myself with hope, its links heavier than any metal known to man. "
12 " He needed time to adjust to real life, where heroes and villains could not be told apart by their looks or their accents, where there were no last minute reversals of fortune. "
13 " Just by saying something was so, they believed that it was. I know know that these conquerors, like many before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it. "
14 " My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her. "
15 " I wondered why God created so many varieties of faiths in the world if He intended all of us to worship Him in the same fashion. "
16 " Nothing new has ever happened to a son of Adam, she said. Everything has already been lived and everything has already been told. If only we listened to the stories. "
17 " Nothing new has ever happened to aq son of Adam, she said. Everything has already been lived and everything has already been told. If only we listened to the stories. "
18 " The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other. "
19 " From that blighted time came the saying: when bellies speak, reason is lost. There "
20 " As the days passed, I began to look upon my fate with new eyes. I often lamented the wicked turns my life had taken, but I rarely considered how much I had to be thankful for, how I had survived so long where so many others had perished, how I had seen wonders that no other Zamori had... I had been so intent on counting all the miseries and humiliations I had endured that I neglected to thank the Almighty for the blessings he had bestowed upon me. "
