Laila Lalami > Quotes

“No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“To overcome my fear, I shackled myself with hope, its links heavier than any metal known to man.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.”
― Laila Lalami, The Other Americans

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, Secret Son

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, Secret Son

“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

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other.”
― Laila Lalami, The Other Americans

“To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Every story needs a villain, she said grimly.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“From that blighted time came the saying: when bellies speak, reason is lost. There”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“There are things far more valuable than private comfort or public admiration.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“In any case, crime is relative — its boundaries shifting in service of the people in power.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it; it isn’t meant to be contained and inventoried for the sake of safety.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“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.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“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

“Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America