47 Quotes by Laila Lalami

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

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.

Instead, I had been pushed further and further into a fate from which no escape or reprieve seemed possible. And so there came a moment when I stopped struggling, when I decided that I would cease making any more plans to return to the old days. I made up my mind to look upon the present as exactly what it was: it was all I had. To add to my sense that my curse had turned into a blessing, not only was I free – I was no longer alone.

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

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.

He, too, wanted to tell the story of our adventure in his own way. Praise.

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.

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.