Home > Author > Laila Lalami
21 " Every story needs a villain, she said grimly. "
― Laila Lalami , The Moor's Account
22 " In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world. "
23 " There are things far more valuable than private comfort or public admiration. "
24 " How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it. "
25 " when I had agreed to sell my life for a bit of gold. My father and my mother had both warned me about the danger of putting a price on everything, but I had not listened. Now, years later, I had convinced myself that, because I had been the first to find gold in La Florida, my life would be returned to me. But life should not be traded for gold—a simple lesson, which I had had to learn twice. It "
26 " I was preoccupied only with the price of things and neglected to consider their value. "
27 " Maybe there is no true story, only imagined stories, vague reflections of what we saw and what we heard, what we felt and what we thought. "
28 " I was a thirty-eight-year-old man, so I had plenty of time to consider the world through the eyes of someone else: yet that someone had rarely been a woman. "
29 " Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven. "
― Laila Lalami , The Other Americans
30 " From my mother and grandmother, I learned about faith as a private relationship with the cosmic, which did not need to be measured by adherence to strict rules and rituals. "
― Laila Lalami , Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
31 " 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, "
32 " Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration. "
33 " All immigrants walk around with a scar left behind by their crossing into a new country, an invisible mark of the exile that became their condition when they were uprooted. "
34 " for it traded what should never be traded. It delivered me into the unknown and erased my father’s name. I could not know that this was just the first of many erasures. I "
35 " name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. "
36 " There was a long silence, during which Father Marco’s thoughts finally drifted from the matter of wealth to the matter of God—few minds can entertain both subjects at once. "
37 " a good story can heal. I "
38 " Race, it turns out, is above all a politically useful fiction. "
39 " I ignored the teachings of our Messenger, that all men are brothers, and that there is no difference among them save in the goodness of their actions. "
40 " But life should not be traded for gold—a simple lesson, which I had had to learn twice. "