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Maaza Mengiste QUOTES

Maaza Mengiste QUOTES

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

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

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

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

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

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

4 " We must not be anything other than what we are. "

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

5 " 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. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

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

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

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

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

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

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

9 " 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. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

10 " 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. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

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

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

12 " 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. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

13 " The routine dulls the terror. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

14 " Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us? "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

15 " He has started to suspect that she is not allowing those with spouses or lovers in his army to share tents. She has told several of his men to stay out of the section she has claimed for her women, and that has separated those who would have met and begun to stay together in the tradition of men and women who march toward war: one following the other, one making the other comfortable, one serving as a surrogate wife without the emotional demands of a spouse. The camps are so divided now that he is sure this is one more thing that his men talk about when he is not there: that this woman, his wife, has come in and changed the way things have always been done when men go to war. But how to raise the issue with them without the glaring admission that his wife has kept herself separate from him, too? "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

16 " 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. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

17 " Those who are dead aren’t worth dying for. "

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

18 " Hope can never come from doing nothing. "

― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze

19 " Go back. Open the bedroom door and send young Aster down the stairs. Place the groom on his feet and draw him away from the bed. Wipe the sheet clean of the bride’s blood. Shake it straight and flatten its wrinkles. Slide off that necklace and return it to the girl as she races to her mother. Fix what has been broken in her, mend it shut again. Clothe him in his wedding finery. Let there be no light. Allow only shadows into this kingdom of man’s making. See him alone in the room. See him free of a father’s attention. See him step beyond the reach of elders and all who advise growing boys on the perils of weakness. Here is Kidane, shaking loose of unseen bindings. Here he is, gifting himself the freedom to tremble. All advice has been taken back and he is no longer the groom instructed to break flesh and draw blood and bring a girl to earthy cries.
See this man in the tender moment before he takes his wife. See him wrestle with the first blooms of untapped emotion. Let the minutes stretch. Remove the expectations of a father. Remove the admonishments to stand tall and stay strong. Eliminate the birthright, the privilege of nobility, the weight of ancestors and blood. Erase his father’s name and that of his grandfather’s father and that of the long line of men before them. Let him stand in the middle of that empty bedroom in his wedding tunic and trousers, in his gilded cape and gold ring, and then disappear his name, too. Make of him nothing and see what emerges willingly, without taint of duty or fear. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King

20 " Here is the truth he wants to ignore: that what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave. "

― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King