Conditional Citizens Quotes

“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, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“Humanity is fundamentally a story of migration.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“Race, it turns out, is above all a politically useful fiction.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“Breaking the silence is a woman's greatest offense, and the culture swiftly punishes her for it.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“White" is seen as the default, the absence of race. ...Whiteness, then, is shrouded in silence. To speak about it openly is to break a taboo.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“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, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“If we want change, we must be agents of change.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“Coexistence, rather, should be the active practice of becoming familiar, whether through exposure to works of imagination or through personal interaction, with people who are different.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“Religion, unlike faith, emphasized strict adherence to texts, and failure to abide by them was perceived as a moral failure.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“The hegemony that her country exercised gave her the privilege of being ignorant about other nations, other peoples, other faiths. It was as though she lived in a garden of innocence, removed from the knowledge that ought to come with being a citizen of the United States, until I appeared on the dais with an apple.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“Yet despite half a century of intervention in Muslim-majority countries—and interruption of their political destinies—this woman was still confused about ISIS. The hegemony that her country exercised gave her the privilege of being ignorant about other nations, other peoples, other faiths.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

“My whole life has been lived in-between -- in between languages, in between cultures, in between countries ... My life resisted the kind of easy categories that the head of state had outlined for everyone. Surely, I told myself, a nation was a community, with views that are by necessity different, often divergent, and occasionally contradictory. Surely, true allegiance meant speaking up when something wasn't right.”
― Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America