Mengestu Quotes

#1. While it's true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both themes with authority and feeling.

Meg Wolitzer

#2. I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.

Dinaw Mengestu

#3. You will never disappear," I said. "Even if it may feel like you have at some point. We're going to remain a part of each other's lives for much longer than we think. There's nothing we can say or do to change that.

Dinaw Mengestu

#4. What I didn't know until then was that loving someone and feeling loved in return was the best exercise for the heart, the strength training needed to do more than simply make it through life.

Dinaw Mengestu

#5. Reality had settled in, and they're both still waiting to recover.

Dinaw Mengestu

#6. If the last thing a man has to hold on to is his sense of pride and accompanying dignity, then more likely than not he will expend every last trace of energy doing so.

Dinaw Mengestu

#7. Don't worry', he said. I almost laughed when he said that. Don't worry. It's only the people who've never had to worry about shit in their lives who say that.

Dinaw Mengestu

#8. I remember another aphorism of my father's, one that he used to say whenever we passed someone pissing openly in the street: add color to life when you can.

Dinaw Mengestu

#9. 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 time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

Dinaw Mengestu

#10. 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, of course, in my decision to write about a handful of particular conflicts in Africa as a journalist.

Dinaw Mengestu

#11. Personally, it's a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.

Dinaw Mengestu

#12. I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

Dinaw Mengestu

#13. I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

Dinaw Mengestu

#14. For the first time in my life, every day when I woke up I had clean clothes, and something to eat two, three times a day, as much as I wanted. Once I had that, I realized my revolution was over.

Dinaw Mengestu

#15. He held up his suitcase. "I've never had much to leave behind," he said.

Dinaw Mengestu

#16. 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 much deeper wounds for us to get to that point.

Dinaw Mengestu

#17. 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 only minor difference between shooting a dog and shooting a man.

Dinaw Mengestu

#18. When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

Dinaw Mengestu

#19. Ghosts are common to the life of any child:mine just happened to come to dinner more often than most

Dinaw Mengestu

#20. 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 that turns everything in one direction, but that's not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives.

Dinaw Mengestu

#21. 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 gain.

Dinaw Mengestu

#22. I wanted to ask him if that was part of the plan, but I knew he would have said yes. The plan was to make war; anything that followed was part of it.

Dinaw Mengestu

#23. 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 an anvil strung around my neck just when I thought I was nearing the shore.

Dinaw Mengestu

#24. 'The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears' is very much about America - it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens to have more characters who are not Ethiopian than who are.

Dinaw Mengestu

#25. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

Dinaw Mengestu

#26. Didn't know one another's names or ages or reasons for being there, and that was fine, because silence isn't the same when it's shared. Its sad and lonely sides are shunted off.

Dinaw Mengestu

#27. The Rwandan policy of putting the genocide behind them is incredibly effective in many ways. But it's also incredibly frightening to think that this nation is being asked put this mass slaughter behind them.

Dinaw Mengestu

#28. What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone.

Dinaw Mengestu

#29. As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

Dinaw Mengestu

#30. 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 Ph.D. or be a lawyer, but as soon as you say something, you may be diminished in the eyes of someone else.

Dinaw Mengestu

#31. When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

Dinaw Mengestu

#32. 'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.

Dinaw Mengestu

#33. 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.

Dinaw Mengestu

#34. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my life and friendships. I learned quickly how to stand alone.

Dinaw Mengestu

#35. 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.

Dinaw Mengestu

#36. History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

Dinaw Mengestu

#37. I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

Dinaw Mengestu

#38. Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances, or they are determined for us.

Dinaw Mengestu

#39. I told my parents I was going to be a doctor and then a lawyer, but I never believed it and never tried.

Dinaw Mengestu

#40. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

Dinaw Mengestu

#41. Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.

Dinaw Mengestu

#42. She always thought Americans were too territorial. 'All those fences and flags,' she had once said, seeing very little difference between the two.

Dinaw Mengestu

#43. Once I began college, I was committed to writing, which I think is different from saying I wanted to become a writer. I knew I would always write; I just wasn't always sure how I would go about doing so.

Dinaw Mengestu

#44. As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it.

Dinaw Mengestu

#45. There is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves.

Dinaw Mengestu