58 Quotes by 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.

Οι αναμνήσεις μας είναι σαν ποτάμι που του έχουν κόψει την έξοδο στον ωκεανό. Με τον καιρό, θα στεγνώσουν κάτω από τον ήλιο, κι εμείς θα πίνουμε ασταμάτητα, χωρίς να ξεδιψάμε.

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.

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.

There's something physical that changes with a person's appearance when they suddenly open up to you.

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.

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

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.

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.