Quotes from Laila Lalami

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

his delirium, did not fear the Apalaches who had been following our procession ever since we began our march to Aute. The Apalaches were such skilled archers that their bows seemed to us like limbs, parts of their bodies they could use with unconscious ease. They could shoot

Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me-that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe. I had to stop playing a part in my own misery. I had to save my own life.

The present could never be untethered from the past, you couldn't understand one without the other. "I heard," I said, and turned

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. At

savored the taste of the lemon slices that floated inside

Before Night Comes. Some people think of it as a modern classic. He also wrote We Ourselves, about Northern Ireland.

She was rich; she had the luxury of having faith. But then, Faten thought, Noura also had the luxury of having no faith; she'd probably found the hijab too constraining and ended up taking it off to show off her designer clothes. That was the thing with money. It gave you choices.

The hegemony that her country exercised gave her the privilege of being ignorant about other nations, other peoples, other faiths. It was as though she lived in a garden of innocence, removed from the knowledge that ought to come with being a citizen of the United States, until I appeared on the dais with an apple.

For me, that was the hardest thing about living in America, being so far away, it was like being orphaned.

Coexistence, rather, should be the active practice of becoming familiar, whether through exposure to works of imagination or through personal interaction, with people who are different.

My whole life has been lived in-between -- in between languages, in between cultures, in between countries ... My life resisted the kind of easy categories that the head of state had outlined for everyone. Surely, I told myself, a nation was a community, with views that are by necessity different, often divergent, and occasionally contradictory. Surely, true allegiance meant speaking up when something wasn't right.

let us leave this land, where we have met nothing but ill luck and misery, and which resembles nothing so much as a great test of our faith and a punishment for our sins.