The Shadow King Quotes

“Girls die from many causes: childbirth, illness, disease, men.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“Make living your act of defiance. Record it all.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“The routine dulls the terror.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“Leo said this: Not many are born when they should be. How I hope this time is meant for you.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“Some people are meant to be owners of things. Others, only to set them in their rightful place and clean them.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“some memories should be barricaded by others, that those strong enough must hold the others at bay.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“Go back. Open the bedroom door and send young Aster down the stairs. Place the groom on his feet and draw him away from the bed. Wipe the sheet clean of the bride’s blood. Shake it straight and flatten its wrinkles. Slide off that necklace and return it to the girl as she races to her mother. Fix what has been broken in her, mend it shut again. Clothe him in his wedding finery. Let there be no light. Allow only shadows into this kingdom of man’s making. See him alone in the room. See him free of a father’s attention. See him step beyond the reach of elders and all who advise growing boys on the perils of weakness. Here is Kidane, shaking loose of unseen bindings. Here he is, gifting himself the freedom to tremble. All advice has been taken back and he is no longer the groom instructed to break flesh and draw blood and bring a girl to earthy cries.
See this man in the tender moment before he takes his wife. See him wrestle with the first blooms of untapped emotion. Let the minutes stretch. Remove the expectations of a father. Remove the admonishments to stand tall and stay strong. Eliminate the birthright, the privilege of nobility, the weight of ancestors and blood. Erase his father’s name and that of his grandfather’s father and that of the long line of men before them. Let him stand in the middle of that empty bedroom in his wedding tunic and trousers, in his gilded cape and gold ring, and then disappear his name, too. Make of him nothing and see what emerges willingly, without taint of duty or fear.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“He has started to suspect that she is not allowing those with spouses or lovers in his army to share tents. She has told several of his men to stay out of the section she has claimed for her women, and that has separated those who would have met and begun to stay together in the tradition of men and women who march toward war: one following the other, one making the other comfortable, one serving as a surrogate wife without the emotional demands of a spouse. The camps are so divided now that he is sure this is one more thing that his men talk about when he is not there: that this woman, his wife, has come in and changed the way things have always been done when men go to war. But how to raise the issue with them without the glaring admission that his wife has kept herself separate from him, too?”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“There are countless ways to put the living in the service of the dying and the dead, to pull a veil over the feebleness of every effort. It is easy to shield ourselves, she [Hirut] thinks as she watches the women continue to pray, from a fact that has always been so: that the dead are stronger. That they know no physical boundaries. They reside in the corners of every memory and rise up, again and again, to resist all our efforts to leave them behind and let them rest.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“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, The Shadow King

“...I have taught myself to believe that what exists is what matters. What is visible is what counts.

[LEO NAVARRA, in a letter to his son Ettore]”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“There are those who are meant for distance, my Ettore. I am one of them and I fear so are you. We are seekers of boundaries. If we are lucky, we will chance upon those generous enough to be drawn into our fold. Your mother has done this for me.

[LEO NAVARRA, in a letter to his son Ettore]”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King