Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

• 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

  Block, Writing, Character

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Reflection, Waiting, Trying

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Nice, Fall

  Dinaw Mengestu (2007). “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears”, p.61, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Leaving, Persist

  Dinaw Mengestu (2010). “How to Read the Air”, p.66, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• 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 were not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

  Dinaw Mengestu

  Fashion, Memories, Past

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Anxiety, Mouths

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Character, America

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Real, Believe

  Dinaw Mengestu (2010). “How to Read the Air”, p.119, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Air, Two, Space

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dog, Father, War

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Growing Up, Color, Skins

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Morning, Sleep

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Jobs, Heart

  Dinaw Mengestu (2014). “All Our Names”, p.17, Knopf

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Breakup, Point Break, Fighter

  Dinaw Mengestu (2010). “How to Read the Air”, p.53, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Summer, Mother, Husband

  Dinaw Mengestu (2010). “How to Read the Air”, p.16, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• Personally, its 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

  Taken, Writing, America

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mom, Growing Up, Mexican

  "Dinaw Mengestu on 'All Our Names'". Interview with Kevin Nance, www.chicagotribune.com. March 21, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

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