To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could un….

You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression..

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….

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….

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 ….

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

I have never been much of a researcher.

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 ….

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 ….

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

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….

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….

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..

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

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

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….

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

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….

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