Quotes from Laila Lalami

I was preoccupied only with the price of things and neglected to consider their value.

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.

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.

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.

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

Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.

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.

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez.

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

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

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.

a good story can heal. I

Race, it turns out, is above all a politically useful fiction.

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.

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

It was a communion of pain, and no one in the city could pretend not to have heard it. The women had made witnesses of us, even those of us who had chosen to close our eyes. •

White" is seen as the default, the absence of race. ...Whiteness, then, is shrouded in silence. To speak about it openly is to break a taboo.

love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.

Perhaps it was because, in those days, I fed my hopes of freedom in whichever way I could, without realizing that I was only hooking myself to different lures. F

There wasn't any point in living when all you could do was survive.

the things you say to impress a beautiful woman have an odd way of being repeated to you when you least expect them.

intend to correct details of the history that was compiled by my companions, the three Castilian

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