47 Quotes by Laila Lalami

Just by saying something was so, they believed that it was. I now 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.

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.

Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In some ways, I think it’s the closest that we come to the truth – is in the form of fiction.