Top 60 Etaf Rum Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Let me tell you something. A man is the only way up in this world, even though he’ll climb a woman’s back to get there. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

— Etaf Rum

2. “But maybe that’s the way of life, Fareeda thought. To understand things only after they had passed, only once it was too late.”

— Etaf Rum

3. “Too often being happy means being passive or playing it safe. There’s no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary. Its discontent that drives creation the most – passion, desire, defiance. Revolutions don’t come from a place of happiness. If anything, I think it’s sadness, or discontent at least, that’s at the root of everything beautiful.”

— Etaf Rum

4. “It’s the loneliest people who love books the most... it was the opposite of loneliness, too, like there were too many people around me, forced connections, that I needed a little isolation to think on my own, to be my own person.”

— Etaf Rum

5. “She wished she could open her mouth and tell her parents, “No, this isn’t the life I want.” But Israa had learned at a very young age that obedience is the only path to love. So she only defied in secret. Mostly with her books.”

— Etaf Rum

6. “A real choice doesn’t have conditions. A real choice is free.”

— Etaf Rum

7. “Learn this now, dear. If you live your life waiting for a man’s love, you’ll be disappointed.”

— Etaf Rum

8. “Fareeda knew that no matter what any woman said, culture could not be escaped. Even if it meant tragedy. Even if it meant death. At least she was able to recognize her role in their culture, own up to it, instead of sitting around saying “If only I had done things differently.” It took more than one woman to do things differently. It took a world of them. She had comforted herself with these thoughts so many times before, but tonight they only filled her with shame.”

— Etaf Rum

9. “Sometimes I wish I could’ve been born a man, just to see how it feels. It would’ve spared me a lot of grief in life.”

— Etaf Rum

10. “If every woman refused to get married after a woman died at the hands of her husband, then no one would ever get married.”

— Etaf Rum

11. “I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later, when I opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could hear me.”

— Etaf Rum

12. “Some days it feels like time is slipping through my fingers like water, as though one day I’ll wake up to find it all gone.”

— Etaf Rum

13. “America was supposed to be the land of the free, so why did everything feel tight and constricted?”

— Etaf Rum

14. “It’s the loneliest people who love books the most.”

— Etaf Rum

15. “Courage will get you everywhere, so long as you believe in yourself and what you stand for,′ said Sarah. ‘You don’t know what your life will be like, and neither do I. The only thing I know for sure is that you alone are in control of your destiny. No one else. You have the power to make your life whatever you want it to be, and in order to do that, you have to find the courage to stand up for yourself, even if you’re standing alone.”

— Etaf Rum

16. “She wished she could be stronger, wished she could be one of those people who could listen to a sad song without bursting into tears, who could read something horrible in the news without feeling sick, who didn’t feel so deeply. But that wasn’t her.”

— Etaf Rum

17. “That was the real reason abuse was so common, Isra thought for the first time. Not only because there was no government protection, but because women were raised to believe they were worthless, shameful creatures who deserved to get beaten, who were made to depend on the men who beat them.”

— Etaf Rum

18. “Books have always kept me company when I felt most alone.”

— Etaf Rum

19. “What I’m trying to say is that if you believe you have power over your life, then you ultimately will. And if you believe you don’t, then you won’t.”

— Etaf Rum

20. “When a woman is shamed and devalued in her community, she learns that the most traumatic events of her life will never be recognized as legitimate, and with that she learns there is no reason to speak them, that to do so might even be dangerous. Instead of reaching out, she is taught to reach in, conceal, pretend. When she internalizes this experience, she begins to enforce this silence in the women around her, teaching her daughters and granddaughters to do the same, a passing down of silence.”

— Etaf Rum

21. “Fear has a way of putting things in perspective.”

— Etaf Rum

22. “But now, reading her books, she was beginning to find a different kind of love. A love that came from inside her, one she felt when she was all alone, reading by the window. And through this love, she was beginning to believe, for the first time in her life, that maybe she was worthy after all.”

— Etaf Rum

23. “Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche has said, “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

— Etaf Rum

24. “Isra felt a sense of failure rising in her. She had tried her best to shelter her daughters from her sadness, they way she wished Mama had sheltered her... Sadness was like a cancer, she thought, a presence that staked its claim so quietly you might not even notice it until it was too late. She hoped her... daughters didn’t see. Maybe Deya could even forget... Isra could still learn to be a good mother. Maybe she could still save them. Maybe it wasn’t too late.”

— Etaf Rum

25. “To surrender to the vulnerability of love and allow ourselves to be loved by others – isn’t that the most courageous act of all?”

— Etaf Rum

26. “It was much more bearable to pretend her life was fiction than to accept her reality for what it was: limited. In fiction, the possibilities of her life were endless. In fiction, she was in control.”

— Etaf Rum

27. “She was likely uneducated, uncivilized, a nobody. Perhaps she was even an extremist, a terrorist. An entire race of culture and experiences diluted into a single story.”

— Etaf Rum

28. “Perhaps that was why she had spent her childhood with a book in front of her face, trying to make sense of her life through stories. Books were her only reliable source of comfort, her only hope.”

— Etaf Rum

29. “Sadness was like a cancer, she thought, a presence that staked it’s claim so quietly you might not even notice it until it was too late. She hoped her other daughters didn’t see.”

— Etaf Rum

30. “Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s patience.”

— Etaf Rum

31. “God help any woman who has to raise a daughter in America.”

— Etaf Rum

32. “She knew she had to teach them how to love themselves, that this was the only way they had a chance at happiness. Only she didn’t see how she could when the world pressed shame into women like pillows into their faces. She wanted to save her daughters from her fate, but she couldn’t seem to find a way out.”

— Etaf Rum

33. “Books were my armor. Everything I’d ever learned growing up, all my thoughts, dreams, goals, experiences, it all came from the books I read. It was like I went around collecting knowledge, plucking it from pages and storing it up, waiting for a chance to use it.”

— Etaf Rum

34. “She couldn’t believe how quickly time had passed, that she had gotten old. Old – she shook the thought away. It was not the thought of being old that bothered her rather the realization of what her life had amounted to. What a shame, she thought now as she waited for sleep to come...”

— Etaf Rum

35. “Language was often a bridge, but sometimes a barrier. No matter how she chose her words, they would always come out a little distorted. So she said nothing for a while. Silence was better than being misunderstood, erased, unseen for who you really were.”

— Etaf Rum

36. “She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other.”

— Etaf Rum

37. “People flee to America from war-torn countries every day. Some are Arabs. Some are Muslims. Some are both, like us. But we could live here for the rest of our lives and never be Americans. You think you’re doing the right thing by wearing this hijab, but that’s not what Americans will see when they look at you. They won’t see your modesty or your goodness. All they’ll see is an outcast, someone who doesn’t belong.”

— Etaf Rum

38. “Perhaps alongside that strength, she had more room for love.”

— Etaf Rum

39. “She often wondered how many people felt this way, spellbound by words, wishing to be tucked inside a book and forgotten there.”

— Etaf Rum

40. “She’d be a writer, helping people understand the world through stories.”

— Etaf Rum

41. “Words could do extraordinary things, but sometimes they were not enough.”

— Etaf Rum

42. “She was a soul torn down the middle, broken in two. Straddled and limited. Here or there, it didn’t matter. She didn’t belong.”

— Etaf Rum

43. “And yet she was no longer a child who could be sustained by the possibility of a better life. This was it. This was her life. Her chance to do better. And she was failing.”

— Etaf Rum

44. “She often wondered how many people felt this way, spellbound by words, wishing to be tucked inside a book and forgotten there. How many people were hoping to find their story inside, desperate to understand. And yet Deya still felt alone in the end, no matter how many books she read, no matter how many tales she told herself.”

— Etaf Rum

45. “Why did she have to be so afraid, so sensitive, so affected by the world?”

— Etaf Rum

46. “Yet as much as she wanted to go out there and venture into the world, there was also a comfort and safety in the known.”

— Etaf Rum

47. “The voice cautioned her to surrender, be quiet, endure. It told her that standing up for herself would only lead to disappointment when she lost the battle. That the things she wanted for herself were a fight she could never win. That it was safer to surrender and do what she was supposed to do.”

— Etaf Rum

48. “It took more than one woman to do things differently. It took a world of them.”

— Etaf Rum

49. “That to understand someone, you had to listen to the words they didn’t say, had to watch them closely.”

— Etaf Rum

50. “She hadn’t realized it meant marrying a man she barely knew, nor that marriage was the beginning and end of her life’s purpose. It was only as she grew older that Deya had truly realized her place in her community. She had learned that there was a certain way she had to live, certain rules she had to follow, and that, as a woman, she would never have a legitimate claim over her own life.”

— Etaf Rum