21 Quotes by Maaza Mengiste

How many shots had to be fired to turn this child back to his home and anxious mother?

what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave.

The nature of love is to kill for it, or to die.

A government of fighters won’t know how to lead, only create more war. You think bravery is measured in resistance.

Maybe it’s the readers that make a book global.

All was normal, Hailu knew without looking, he could understand the body’s silent language without the help of machinery. Years of practice had taught him how to decipher what most patients couldn’t articulate. These days were teaching him more: that the frailty of our bodies stems from the heart and travels to the brain. That what the body feels and thinks determines the way it stumbles and falls.

Girls die from many causes: childbirth, illness, disease, men.

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.

Those who are dead aren’t worth dying for.