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Quotes from Shadow King — Maaza Mengiste

born 1974 United States

← All quotes by Maaza Mengiste

13 quotes

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

Shadow King (2019)

She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones.

Shadow King (2019)

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

Shadow King (2019)

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.

Shadow King (2019)

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.

Shadow King (2019)

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.

Shadow King (2019)

Make living your act of defiance. Record it all.

Shadow King (2019)

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

Shadow King (2019)

She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside.

Shadow King (2019)

What he 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.

Shadow King (2019)

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

Shadow King (2019)

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.

Shadow King (2019)

The routine dulls the terror.

Shadow King (2019)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Maaza Mengiste (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.