Top 40 Laila Lalami Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

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

— Laila Lalami

3. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

4. “In Arabic, the name Guadalajara evoked a valley of stones, a valley my ancestors had settled more than eight hundred years earlier. They had carried the disease of empire to Spain, the Spaniards had brought it to the new continent, and someday the people of the new continent would plant it elsewhere. That was the way of the world.”

— Laila Lalami

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

— Laila Lalami

6. “My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.”

— Laila Lalami

7. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

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

— Laila Lalami

9. “Maybe there is no true story, only imagined stories, vague reflections of what we saw and what we heard, what we felt and what we thought.”

— Laila Lalami

10. “No lies are more seductive than the ones we use to console ourselves.”

— Laila Lalami

11. “Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.”

— Laila Lalami

12. “He warned me that trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it.”

— Laila Lalami

13. “There are things far more valuable than private comfort or public admiration.”

— Laila Lalami

14. “The elders teach us: be a trickster, and you will survive.”

— Laila Lalami

15. “Every story needs a villain, she said grimly.”

— Laila Lalami

16. “It is easy to blame the cacique, Tahacha said. But he is only a man; he derives his power from other men, who will follow him for only as long as they believe in him. It.”

— Laila Lalami

17. “Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller.”

— Laila Lalami

18. “But life should not be traded for gold – a simple lesson, which I had had to learn twice.”

— Laila Lalami

19. “From that blighted time came the saying: when bellies speak, reason is lost. There.”

— Laila Lalami

20. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

21. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

22. “Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.”

— Laila Lalami

23. “The universe had an odd sense of fairness; it took away things one did not want to give up, and then gave things one did not ask for.”

— Laila Lalami

24. “As the days passed, I began to look upon my fate with new eyes. I often lamented the wicked turns my life had taken, but I rarely considered how much I had to be thankful for, how I had survived so long where so many others had perished, how I had seen wonders that no other Zamori had... I had been so intent on counting all the miseries and humiliations I had endured that I neglected to thank the Almighty for the blessings he had bestowed upon me.”

— Laila Lalami

25. “How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians – just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. 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.”

— Laila Lalami

26. “Race, it turns out, is above all a politically useful fiction.”

— Laila Lalami

27. “Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.”

— Laila Lalami

28. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

29. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

30. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

31. “There was a long silence, during which Father Marco’s thoughts finally drifted from the matter of wealth to the matter of God – few minds can entertain both subjects at once.”

— Laila Lalami

32. “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.”

— Laila Lalami

33. “I was preoccupied only with the price of things and neglected to consider their value.”

— Laila Lalami

34. “There wasn’t any point in living when all you could do was survive.”

— Laila Lalami

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

— Laila Lalami

36. “I ignored the teachings of our Messenger, that all men are brothers, and that there is no difference among them save in the goodness of their actions.”

— Laila Lalami

37. “Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.”

— Laila Lalami

38. “Now he wanted that which had always been my own – my story. Tell.”

— Laila Lalami

39. “Of all the contracts I had signed, this was perhaps the only one that my father could never have imagined me signing, for it traded what should never be traded. It delivered me into the unknown and erased my father’s name. I could not know that this was just the first of many erasures.”

— Laila Lalami

40. “All immigrants walk around with a scar left behind by their crossing into a new country, an invisible mark of the exile that became their condition when they were uprooted.”

— Laila Lalami

41. “From my mother and grandmother, I learned about faith as a private relationship with the cosmic, which did not need to be measured by adherence to strict rules and rituals.”

— Laila Lalami

42. “Religion, unlike faith, emphasized strict adherence to texts, and failure to abide by them was perceived as a moral failure.”

— Laila Lalami