Top 60 Etaf Rum Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A daughter was only a temporary guest, quietly awaiting another man to scoop her away, along with all her financial burden.”

— Etaf Rum

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “But what if I don’t want to get married?′ Deya had asked. ‘Why does my entire life have to revolve around a man?”

— Etaf Rum

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Etaf Rum

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

— Etaf Rum

17. “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

18. “It’s hard to belong anywhere, truly belong, if we don’t belong to ourselves first.”

— Etaf Rum

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

— Etaf Rum

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Everything we draw into our life is a mirror of our thought patterns and beliefs. In a way, we can control the outcome of our future just by thinking more positively and visualizing only the things we want for ourselves.”

— Etaf Rum

25. “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

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

— Etaf Rum

27. “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.”

— Etaf Rum

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Etaf Rum

34. “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

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

— Etaf Rum

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

— Etaf Rum

37. “She wanted to be happy. But she felt as though she wore a stain she couldn’t wash off.”

— Etaf Rum

38. “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

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

— Etaf Rum

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

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

— Etaf Rum

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

— Etaf Rum

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

— Etaf Rum

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

— Etaf Rum

50. “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