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

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

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 themes with authority and feeling.

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

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 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 with great tenderness.

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

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

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

My books are a word feast.

We have overcome heartaches by being kind to others and by supporting each other.

Free markets select for winning solutions.

Let your Christianity be so unmistakable, your eye so single, your heart so whole, your walk so straightforward, that all who see you may have no doubt whose you are, and whom you serve.

Books and teachers are always "right", and we learn only from them, not from any other resource in the room, such as our friends.

The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.

I would, however, question the implication that there is some novelty in this beyond modalities [of Mikhail Bakunin], which naturally change as institutions change and develop.

You're always in the kitchen," Alianora said when she poked her head through the door a moment later. "Or the library. Don't you ever do anything but cook and read?

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

It's hard not to be sexy in a pair of high heels.