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Quote by Laila Lalami

“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.”

Quote by Laila Lalami

Book:Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
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Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

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Author

Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist born in 1968. Her works often focus on themes of immigration, identity, and cultural conflict, and have been well-received by readers. more

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“Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how much out of the way we live. 'Neither by land nor sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans': Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn,' sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill—from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of heart which 'forgives' everything because it 'Understands' everything is sirocco to us. Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! ...We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality—was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from 'resignation'.... There was a thunderstorm in our air, the nature which we are grew dark—for we had no road. Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal...”

ModernityNihilismFatalityClassicismHellenicHyperboreans
Book:Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
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“It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.”

MaterialismApolloNietzscheLife AffirmingClassicismBirth Of TragedyDionyosLife DenyingTwilight Of The Idols
Book:Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
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“As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You pays your money and you makes your choice!” That may be the most American sentence ever written.”

American HistoryAmericansU S HistoryClassicism
Book:First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
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