Amin Maalouf Quotes

I felt like I needed to come to terms with the decision I'd made to let go of my family. What do you do when you want to be loyal to your family but you feel that loyalty to them is in conflict somehow with loyalty to yourself?

I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.

...being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

When I look in the mirror, I see about a thousand different Jadas.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

I've gone through a lot of different phases on what I do and why I do it - morally and ethically. I've tortured myself about it, especially in dealing with success and money.

I’m not a romantic, I’m a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I’m smart. I’m not something anyone should know. I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned and pretended I didn’t recognize. I’m all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I’m not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing. I’m a blemished blemish, a ruined ruin, a stained wreck so failed I can’t see what I used to be.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

a public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast?

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

Sin is the Monster we love to deny. It is crouching at the door and it wants you, but you must overcome it.

She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.

I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.

I always knew where I needed to go but I sometimes had a problem getting there, so I had to work harder at it. Once in a while I'd wanna take off the blouse and heels because I'd get that "I just wanna be a guy" feeling I had when growing up.

I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.