Laila Lalami Quotes

Lucky Aziz. He curses his own luck.

All of my books have focused on characters that are displaced and having to start over in some place new, and how the new landscape shapes the person you are and the person you become. (2019)

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. (p129)

A bit salty dear," she said. Faten smiled, grateful for the truth.

She had to do something for her future—today.

Better than the Moroccans themselves.

White Americans take that for granted in that they just have to turn on the TV or open the newspaper to see that. That isn’t something that everyone has, so these kinds of stories can be very affirming. As far as representation, it’s an interesting word. It conjures up some kind of necessity. For me, I write what I know. I’m Moroccan so I write Moroccan characters. I write in the specific, not with the burden of representing an entire Moroccan immigrant experience, but just those of my often very-flawed characters. I write in their specificity, with their unresolved conflicts and flaws, and that is how I expect to have any hope of reaching readers and showing some kind of truth that resonates with them. (2019)

But, he tried to tell himself, maybe this was just a fleeting interest, maybe it would all go away.

(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m moved by voices that ring so true that they make me feel kinship with characters who are completely different from me. As I get older, I also find myself moved by depictions of friendship and kindness, which are so much harder to execute convincingly on the page than cruelty or betrayal.

I 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. (p8)

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. (p122)

I think of history as a dialogue with the present, so whenever I’m puzzled by the turn of current events — which is all too often these days — I look to the past for context.

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. (p232)

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. (p88)

He couldn't understand these foreigners. They could go to a nice hotel, have a clean bed, go to the beach or the pool, and here they were in the worst part of town, looking around for something exotic.