Laila Lalami Quotes

“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

“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

“To overcome my fear, I shackled myself with hope, its links heavier than any metal known to man.”

— Laila Lalami

“Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller.”

— Laila Lalami

“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

“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

“No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.”

— Laila Lalami

“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

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

“Name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world.”

— Laila Lalami

“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

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

“You miss Azemmur, she said.
Yes, I said. And I have grown so used to the pain of missing it that sometimes I feel as though I have learnt to walk after an imputation. But now, Oyomasot, it is as if I can sense that severed limb again.”

— Laila Lalami

“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

“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.”

— Laila Lalami

“From that blighted time came the saying: when bellies speak, reason is lost.”

— Laila Lalami

“Of all the contracts I had signed, this was perhaps the only one that my father could never have imagined me signing, 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.”

— Laila Lalami

“But life should not be traded for gold-a simple lesson, which I had had to learn twice.”

— Laila Lalami

“But he is only a man; he derives his power from other men, who will follow him for only as long as they believe in him.”

— Laila Lalami

“There are things far more valuable than private comfort or public admiration.”

— Laila Lalami

“He warned me that trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it.”

— Laila Lalami

“Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.”

— Laila Lalami

“In some ways, I think it's the closest that we come to the truth - is in the form of fiction.”

— Laila Lalami

“Immigration, a lexicon. You're a 'migrant' when you're very poor; 'immigrant' when you're not so poor; and 'expat' when you're rich.”

— Laila Lalami