Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

23 quotes in 630 categories

• There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up only because we…
• It's hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It's nice to think there's a purpose, or even a real decision…
• It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we…
• The world around us is alive, he would have said, with our emotions and thoughts, and the space between any two people are charged with…
• My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte…
• The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree…
• At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be…
• We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.
• I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human encounter felt like…
• Don't think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes - study the extraordinary and the mundane through…
• You see, at the beginning we weren't fighters. We weren't yellers or throwers, even if we eventually came to be. It would take time and…
• I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.
• When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican,…
• My parents never referenced Ethiopia that much, largely because of the circumstances under which we left. We left during a time of political upheaval, and…
• In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.
• The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my…
• The fact that I have always been deeply invested in politics, and African politics in particular, inevitably played a role in my first novel and,…
• Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for their own political…
• I told my parents I was going to be a doctor and then a lawyer, but I never believed it and never tried.
• I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a…

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