Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken serio….

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing..

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island na….

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember….

I have never been much of a researcher.

But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way….

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it..

And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it toward you, and as it collects, you rea….

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t neces….

We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to….

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it..

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see ….

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force..

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love..

Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variatio….

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star..

This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it..

I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it ….

When I wrote The Interestings, I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move ….

While it's true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both….

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot..