Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Everybody's past and history informs them.

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.

You can't know who you are, as a nation or a people, unless you know where you've been.

I'm fascinated about how past events shape our perception of current events and how they make us the people we are.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

The background - your own history - is way more important than what you can achieve as a professional.

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.

The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

I don't really think about having had a hard life. It was just my life, and it's all I knew. It made me who I am - all the good and bad - and it's where all of the songs on Here For The Party came from. I've lived them all.

Nations, like individuals, are largely the product of their environment; and many of their characteristics, their fears and their neuroses, as well as their abilities, are conditioned by the impressions of what we may call their early childhood.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

Things have changed so much. People walked away from a simple life we had in the '20s and '30s, and I am glad that I am able to touch that period in our lives with the shows that I do and with the music that I do.

Any decision that I make, anything that I do, every single consideration of my day goes through the prism of what my former experience has been.

Without understanding your history, you can't get a perspective about the present.

I always thought that a film about how my father's life was shaped in his early years in Hong Kong would be a worthwhile story to share so we could better understand him as a human being and a warrior.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.