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41 " Hailu had the appearance of a man dragging death with him through life. "
― Maaza Mengiste , Beneath the Lion's Gaze
42 " Who’s left to rule if everyone’s in jail. "
43 " We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction. "
― Maaza Mengiste , The Shadow King
44 " He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish. "
45 " Every sun creates a shadow and not all are blest to stand in the light. We have returned, he tells himself. Minim looks down at his slender fingers, the nails still neatly filed and short. He glances down at his feet, and lays a hand on the beard he learned to trim as well as any royal barber. Every day, he will grow back into himself until he can be who he is: a man who was once everything to everyone, then was reborn again to be nothing. "
46 " As writers we like to say that imagination moves faster than awareness, but I realize, too, that awareness is shaped by imagination. There is no other way to understand what is contained in a certain moment in history—those 500,000 gone, those three wars fought—without first imagining the individual stories unfolding at its center. "
― Maaza Mengiste
47 " She knows precisely that to take from one day gives nothing to the other. That what the left hand hides, the right does not necessarily reveal. That blood can conspire to give life and to take it, to murder and to bless, to confirm a woman’s place in the world every month, and deny it. "
