47 Quotes by 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.

Yet despite half a century of intervention in Muslim-majority countries—and interruption of their political destinies—this woman was still confused about ISIS. The hegemony that her country exercised gave her the privilege of being ignorant about other nations, other peoples, other faiths.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.