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The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After QUOTES

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After QUOTES

1 " I could no longer discern what was real and what was fake. Everything, including the present, seemed to be both too much and nothing at all. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

2 " Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection. It was based on the fear of losing them. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

3 " It's strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

4 " You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try and stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which was also a number. If you died, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

5 " When you're traumatized, your sense of self, your individuality, is beaten up. Your skin color, your background, your pain, your hope, your gender, your faith, it's all defiled. Those essential pieces of yourself are stolen. You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own. To continue to exist, as a whole person, you need to re-create, for yourself, an identity untouched by everything that's been used against you. You need to imagine and build a self out of elements that are not tainted. You need to remake yourself on your own terms. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

6 " Our minds are malleable. Our minds can be possessed - possessed so gradually that we don’t even realize we’ve lost control. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

7 " The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs -- they're all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so-called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another? "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

8 " I wanted to retain the right to disappear. Remaining in place, nesting -- it sets off fears that somebody would yank me away. To counter it, I had to flee. I had to reassure myself that I still knew how to escape. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

9 " I've seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

10 " Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

11 " The only road to equality—a sense of common humanity; peace—is sharing, my mother’s orange. When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you. When we share, you are not insisting on being my savior. Claire and I always looked for the sharers, the people who just said, “I have sugar, I have water. Let’s share "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

12 " Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

13 " When you don't belong to a country, the world decides that you don't deserve a thing. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

14 " I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

15 " Two people in pain are magnets, repelling each other. We cannot or will not reach across the space to connect. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

16 " The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

17 " In my version of the story, the girl walks the earth and she is always safe, undeniably strong and brave - a dream, a superstar, a goddess of sorts. I needed to believe those things were possible and that they might be true about me too. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

18 " I did not understand the point of the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie. It cannot do justice--it is not meant to do justice--to the thing it describes. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

19 " Maintaining my body had been so much work, so costly. Protecting it had been a never-ending battle. It was not a source of joy. I had been dragging it around for thirteen years, trying to keep it from harm. I felt like it stood in my way. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

20 " But people need to know, people need to say to themselves, ‘I cannot do this thing because this thing is unforgivable. I cannot decide my wife is a cockroach. I cannot decide my neighbor is a snake. I cannot kill my wife. I cannot kill my neighbor. I cannot make others less than human and then kill them. This is unforgivable. This will never be forgiven. "

― Clemantine Wamariya , The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After