Alaa Alghamdi > Quotes

“We have to make our right
Wherever we are, out of whatever is there.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Allah belonged here too.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Christian women also, at one time, covered their heads—not just nuns but all women when they entered churches, until quite recently.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“The place would welcome you back in five days or in five years or in fifty or, for that matter, if such things were possible, in five hundred years.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“The logical conclusion of any political expansion surely was equally detrimental, equally devastating, if and when it happened to be successful?”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“People just begin to fall apart, and it’s hard for anyone else, anyone on the outside, to hold them together.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Saudi girls stay home, or they get good jobs or good educations.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“We must always remember that our cultural figures are not the guardians of our morality. We must guard that for ourselves.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“In the end, it’s pointless. All they’re ever looking for is their Hollywood love story.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“It’s when life starts going wrong, when things start being horrible ,that you first realize that life isn’t like anything in a book You wish you could go back to how it was before, but you can’t. Life isn’t really like a book.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“No, said Maryam. “It doesn’t limit my participation in the world.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“You needed experience in order to get a job, so, in effect, you needed experience in order to gain experience. Those who didn’t have it were precisely those who had little hope of ever getting it.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“It never hurts to know your enemy.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Their bodies were tanned, toned, and golden. From where had
come the notion that the British were all pale and pasty-looking? … Would they modify their appearance as they got older? For seeking employment, likely, it would be necessary, wouldn’t it.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“What did it matter? Didn’t she have as much right to wear a head scarf? The girl’s accent was English.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“When in Rome, do as the
Romans. That was not just friendly advice. That was survival.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“He was not a colonizer. He was a giver, not a taker.”
― Alaa Alghamdi

“It was a habit—that’s what it was called—not a veil. But then they kicked the habit.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“The words were right, but the reasoning wasn’t.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“As a teacher, I do not only explain concepts; my job is to inspire too.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“It’s only literature, I know, but it does something, or at least it says something.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“When did that higher, more spiritual conviction become something craven and greedy? And then again when did that greed transform itself into something worse, something less of the instinct and more closely related to the higher faculties?”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“when she looked at him here in the dusk, her first and overwhelming desire, if one could call it that, was to invite him to take a nap, to offer him a soft place to rest. That was all.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Jerusalem, How cruel it was, after all, That the geographical center of their faith was not actually located within the confines of the Christian world at all.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“How nice it was when expressions and idioms really echoed actual fact , and became literal , as well as figurative , truths all the same time.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Their presence here, however, was an act of imperialism. Was she complicit in it by being grateful and partaking? The worse thing perhaps was that the British were so oblivious to the presence of any issue regarding the placement of these treasures.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“From other Muslim women she saw, although they were similarly uncovered, she felt waves of cynical disapproval. Their stony expressions seemed to say, you see how these young girls abandon their ways as soon as they are set free. A mistake to let them come here. And from the non-Muslim majority, she received the imaged phantom of the kind of judgment she would get if she did dare to cover her face here.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“There was much love but no pretense between them.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“The little guy never wins.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina

“Complacent. Complacence does not take you to good places.”
― Alaa Alghamdi, Road to Madina