21 Quotes by Maaza Mengiste

We must not be anything other than what we are.

The rich think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right to call it theirs.

What is knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

She is a soldier trapped inside a barbed-wire fence, but she is still at war and the battlefield is her own body, and perhaps, she has come to realize as a prisoner, that is where it has always been.

The routine dulls the terror.

She has grown so numb that it no longer matters whether he might strike her or not. She does not care if he takes out his camera to push it in her face. She is not afraid of him anymore.

What can he know except what he sees while staring at that young woman grasping knotted silk as if she was born to be draped in it: a beauty incomprehensible and ferocious, strong enough to break through bone and settle into a heart and split it forever.

When you are convinced that everything that happens is the will of God, what is there to do but wait until God has mercy?