At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor diffe…

- Dinaw Mengestu

There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up only because we have to. We live in the shado…

- Dinaw Mengestu

Don't think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes - study the extraordinary and the mundane through t…

- Dinaw Mengestu

I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a Ph.D. or be a lawyer, bu…

- Dinaw Mengestu

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might …

- Dinaw Mengestu

The world around us is alive, he would have said, with our emotions and thoughts, and the space between any two people are charged with them all. He …

- Dinaw Mengestu

When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican,…

- Dinaw Mengestu

You see, at the beginning we weren't fighters. We weren't yellers or throwers, even if we eventually came to be. It would take time and much deeper w…

- Dinaw Mengestu

We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

- Dinaw Mengestu