Dinaw Mengestu Quotes
The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.
Quotes to Explore
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Free people make the only milieu possible in society for the full gift of one's self to church, state, and family. Free people enjoy and sustain and feel with one another because they live for one another. The paths of life are intermingled lives.
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To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.
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If you come to my house, you won't see a wall of trophies or things like that. I'm sort of 'on to the next thing' all the time.
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'Shameless' was such a weird time in my life because I never really experienced any kind of role that put me that much in the spotlight before.
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The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted.
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For my parents' generation, the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love; it was a partnership. It's about creating family; it's about creating offspring. Indian culture is essentially much more of a 'we' culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate.
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My message to the kids and our fans is hockey's a great game. There's a lot of hockey being played at all levels. Get involved, do it. We will be back and we will be back better than ever and hopefully as soon as possible. Don't give up on the game. It's too good.
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In a world awash in debt, power shifts to creditors.
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The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.
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We must keep both our femininity and our strength.
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I'm going to try to do music for the rest of my life, but that's just trying. Maybe it's not going to work out. Who knows?
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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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The whole decathlon is ridiculous, but the 1,500 meters is insanity.
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That's the thing with sci-fi and action roles. You have to play the danger as real. If you don't, you end up with egg on your face. You have to commit. You can't think about how stupid it might look without the special effects.
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My siblings and I, we were raised on TV and films. Not a day went by that we weren't watching one of three movies - 'Caddyshack,' 'Animal House,' 'Beverly Hills Cop' - on rotation. Our comedy, our personalities were set watching 'Sesame Street': these really sort of wacky, Jim Henson-y characters.
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It's a trap I've fallen into earlier in my career - trying to be liked. Don't do it. When I watch TV and I see someone trying to make me like them, acting cute or quirky or goofy, I'm not impressed. Don't act like America's watching you. Just latch onto your character. Characters are flawed. Be unlikeable. Be flawed. Be a person.
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I'm a television junkie.
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We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
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In the summer or fall of 1974, I read some books about factory farming, and decided that I wanted no part of it.
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...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole.
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Astrobiology is a great point of contact for science outreach. The public is naturally interested in extra-terrestrial life. Astrobiology provides an accessible point of access that leads to deeper questions.
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Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
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Digital technology has thrown a closed shop wide open, and there are more people out there snapping away than ever before. Some of the pictures are bad, some of them are good, and many of them need some seasoning and direction.
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The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.
