Quotes from 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.

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.

The men who beat me were driven as much by fear as hate.

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

In our rush to presumably better ourselves we had both missed what had otherwise always been obvious—that it often didn't take much more than careful consideration of each other's needs to secure a degree of happiness.

Silence isn't the same when it's shared.

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

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.

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.

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.

In fact, there is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves.

I was reminded that without him I made an impact on no one. I was seen, and perhaps occasionally heard, strictly by strangers, and always in passing. I was a much poorer man for this than I had ever thought.

They stared at me, at Isaac, and then at the floor rather than at each other, as if they had long since come to terms with the fact that on any given evening men could burst into their house and do something terrible to them. There's no honest measure for the toll that sort of knowledge takes, whether the scale is the breadth of a single room or an entire city.

Perhaps she thought, this was the way everything in America actually was- all smoke and mirrors, with only illusions of grandeur.

There is nothing more restless than men in power.

Have you seen a hungry man with a gun? Of course not. Such things don't exist. It's like saying, have you ever seen a hungry lion? Of course not, because as soon as you did he wouldn't be hungry anymore. The men here with guns are the same. They can shoot, arrest, kill anyone they want. They've done it many times before. If a soldier sees you there's nothing I can do to help. Not even God will save a fool.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.