Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other.

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

Every story needs a villain, she said grimly.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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