The Dream Hotel Quotes

“To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“In any case, crime is relative — its boundaries shifting in service of the people in power.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it; it isn’t meant to be contained and inventoried for the sake of safety.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Under the right circumstances, anything can be made into something sinister.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“A crime isn’t the same as a moral transgression. The law delineates the former, never the latter. I have done nothing wrong, Sara thinks. It’s only that the line of legality has moved, and now I’m on the wrong side of it.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Freedom isn’t a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“But what the mind can’t comprehend, the heart has enough sense to feel.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“She has learned to wear a mask of detachment, has become so adept at it that someday, she fears, it may become her only face.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“That no matter how unjust the system is, she is expected to submit to it in order to prove that she deserves to be free of its control.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“But what they don’t see, what they can never truly see unless they had been, like her, confined and controlled, is that isolation is the opposite of salvation, that she owes her release to the women who joined together to say no.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“The law separates the permitted from the forbidden, but it doesn’t require that a crime be committed before the agents acting in its name deploy the full force of their power.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“She must turn her gaze to the future instead, start thinking like a scientist, or better yet like a software engineer. Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“She stood there a minute, looking at the door, her hands balled into fists. Is This Real? I Can’t Tell.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Freedom is not a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming, and complicated, and yes — risky. And it can only be written in the company of others.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

“Isolation is the opposite of salvation.”
― Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel