Best 22 quotes of Laila Lalami on MyQuotes

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.

Every book leaves its mark on you. It might leave you hungry for that kind of book or you may be satiated, and you're eager to read something else. It might send you in a completely different direction. I love that about reading.

Few [books] get translated and the ones that do have trouble making it into the mainstream. It's more likely that Americans will discover another culture through an American writer rather read a writer from that culture.

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

I also read a lot of nonfiction. I just got "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein. I felt like what with everything that is going on with the president [Donald trump] and the parallels with [Richard] Nixon's presidency, I needed to know more about the man.

I began reading in French. I didn't read in English until high school.

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

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.

In some ways, I think it's the closest that we come to the truth — is in the form of fiction.

I [read] "The Book of Unknown Americans," which is by a friend of mine, Cristina Henriquez, and is about two Latino, immigrant families who live in Delaware. I'm interested in reading things from different perspectives.

I read "The Conquest of New Spain" by Bernal Diz Del Castillo, which I recommend to a lot of people. He was an eyewitness of [Hernando] Cortez's conquest of Mexico. It's at once very brutal and at times very plodding. It tells what they did everyday, so days can go by and nothing happens. Then all of the sudden they are torturing and doing all these dark things.

No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez.

The ones that were relevant while I wrote my book were books like "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, which is based on a historical fact, "Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow, and "True History of the Kelly Gang" by Peter Carey.

There are writers I return to no matter what I'm working on, writers like the South African J.M. Coetzee. He has an ability to make you feel that he is writing for you alone.

There is a insularity within American fiction even for adults. It's very tough for books in translation in the US.

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.

When I was a child, I was reading books filled with people different from me, all French, all foreigners. There was a sense of disconnect between my sense of imagination and the world around me, which I don't think is common for Americans. It forces you to learn to look at the world through other people's eyes.

His anger took many shapes: sometimes soft and familiar, like a round stone he had caressed for so long that is was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside.

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.

Standing in that half-finished church, surrounded by statues of prophets and saints, 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. This thought had never occurred to me when I was a young boy memorizing the Holy Qur'an, but as I spent time with the Indians I came to see how limiting the notion of one true faith really was. Was the diversity in our beliefs, not their unity, the lesson God wanted to impart? Surely it would have been in His power to make us of one faith if that had been His wish. Now the idea that there was only one set of stories for all of mankind seemed strange to me.

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.

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