Top 35 Maaza Mengiste Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The rich think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right to call it theirs.”

— Maaza Mengiste

2. “Make living your act of defiance. Record it all.”

— Maaza Mengiste

3. “We must not be anything other than what we are.”

— Maaza Mengiste

4. “The nature of love is to kill for it, or to die.”

— Maaza Mengiste

5. “All was normal, Hailu knew without looking, he could understand the body’s silent language without the help of machinery. Years of practice had taught him how to decipher what most patients couldn’t articulate. These days were teaching him more: that the frailty of our bodies stems from the heart and travels to the brain. That what the body feels and thinks determines the way it stumbles and falls.”

— Maaza Mengiste

6. “A government of fighters won’t know how to lead, only create more war. You think bravery is measured in resistance.”

— Maaza Mengiste

7. “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

8. “How many shots had to be fired to turn this child back to his home and anxious mother?”

— Maaza Mengiste

9. “Maybe it’s the readers that make a book global.”

— Maaza Mengiste

10. “Hope can never come from doing nothing.”

— Maaza Mengiste

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Girls die from many causes: childbirth, illness, disease, men.”

— Maaza Mengiste

15. “Those who are dead aren’t worth dying for.”

— Maaza Mengiste

16. “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

17. “The routine dulls the terror.”

— Maaza Mengiste

18. “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

19. “Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?”

— Maaza Mengiste

20. “My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.”

— Maaza Mengiste

21. “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.”

— Maaza Mengiste

22. “What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.”

— Maaza Mengiste

23. “These aren’t the days to pretend you’re only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We’re more than this.”

— Maaza Mengiste

24. “Some people are meant to be owners of things. Others, only to set them in their rightful place and clean them.”

— Maaza Mengiste

25. “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

26. “Because: there are mercies in this world that must be granted to those who have remained unmarked all their lives. There are unspoken rules for those who were born to carry rich histories and noble blood. There are ways the world must move in order to keep everything intact, and girls with scars must.”

— Maaza Mengiste

27. “You have to know how to stand so they see you but do not see you. You have to look at them as if you are not looking. Be invisible but helpful. Be useful but absent. Be like air, like nothing.”

— Maaza Mengiste

28. “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.”

— Maaza Mengiste

29. “Leo said this: Not many are born when they should be. How I hope this time is meant for you.”

— Maaza Mengiste

30. “Aster opens the gate just as Kidane did hours ago, then climbs on the mare, kicks it haunches, and gallops down the worn path that blooms into countless destinations.”

— Maaza Mengiste

31. “She is careful, reveling in the thrill of possession, made bold by the sudden freedom of theft.”

— Maaza Mengiste

32. “She did not understand until seeing Aster that there is a different kind of exposure, one that is indecent and upsetting. That some bodies were not meant to bend, and that this makes them weaker rather than stronger, unable to withstand what those like her can walk through their days locking into pockets and ignoring.”

— Maaza Mengiste

33. “Then one day, weeks later, he stops her at the gate and gathers her in his arms and whispers into her ear: What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.”

— Maaza Mengiste

34. “She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever.”

— Maaza Mengiste

35. “He holds no importance except what memory allows.”

— Maaza Mengiste

36. “The blow comes as a relief to Hirut. It is something to do: to be hit. It is somewhere to go: to be in pain.”

— Maaza Mengiste

37. “Standing on deck, feeling the weight of his camera in his hand, Ettore realizes again that he has spent all his years since he was a child trying to capture what cannot be spoken, to manifest visually a world both trapped in darkness and defined by it.”

— Maaza Mengiste