Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

“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 stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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 have to. We live in the shadow of every neighborhood. We own little corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day. We spend our afternoons gazing lazily out of windows. Somnambulists, all of us. Someone else said it better: we wake to sleep and sleep to wake.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“There is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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 Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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 them all. He had learned early in his life that before any violent gesture there is a moment when the act is born, not as something that can be seen or felt, but by the change it precipitates in the air.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Ghosts are common to the life of any child:mine just happened to come to dinner more often than most”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“Reality had settled in, and they're both still waiting to recover.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

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

“Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

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

“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

“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 that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked for her better than they did in the one I never heard.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

“We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander through the city for five or six hours since neither one of us had a private place that we could retreat to. Walking out in the open for so long only helped to draw us closer. There was too much space on the avenues, and the side streets were often too crowded with people and cabs hurrying to cut across town. To counter that we held each other's hands and arms, ribs and waists.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

“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

“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

“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, half-black. Another one was from Colombia. Another one was born in the U.S., but his mom was from Germany and spoke with a German accent. So we all had multiple identities.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

“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

“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 there was a lot of loss that came with that, so my parents were reluctant to talk about those things. So I had, by and large, an American childhood.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

“I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

“'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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“As far as I could tell, no one had noticed us. I thought this was what it felt like to be invisible, but when I subtracted Isaac I realized that, until he came along, this was how I had always felt. Not invisible, but a natural part of the background, entitled to all the privileges that came with ownership.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“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

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

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 their particular perspective. Walk around the block with them, stroll the rooms they live in, figure out what objects on the cluttered dining room table they would inevitably stare at the longest, and then learn why.

— Dinaw Mengestu