Quotes from Ingrid Betancourt

I have to forget in order to find peace in my soul and be able to forgive.

Like in every peace process, and especially in Colombia, there all kinds of problems that will come through. Not only is the process by itself very complicated but it has lots of underground complications.

In the jungle, faith also became something very real; it helped me to understand what was happening to me and changed my questions.

I lived for nearly seven years with the awareness that death was my everyday companion.

When you have a chain around your neck, you have to keep your head down and try to accept your fate without succumbing entirely to humiliation, without forgetting who you are.

I didn't want to be a number. I didn't want to be an object.

You don't master your fear. You're not able to say, 'I'm not going to be scared.' But what you can do is say, 'OK, I'm very very scared, but I have to do this and this and this.'

The thing is that war is the opposite of negotiation. It's when you cannot negotiate, when you cannot talk, when you cannot reach agreements that then you have war.

We can't continue with a justice of vengeance. Peace will require us to accept a certain degree of impunity; it's inevitable.

In a kidnapping, you leave behind a lot of your baggage, like arrogance and stubbornness.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

I don't want to be submerged by depression.

I want to serve my country, but not necessarily in the political arena.

More than a victim, I am a survivor of a dehumanization process.

Beyond my fear I felt the need to defend my identity, to not let them turn me into a thing or a number.

Julia didn't want to leave Colonia. She liked her little world, the cobbled streets that wound upward as if searching for the sky; her own sloping, rickety house with its roof of crooked pink tiles - the exclusive domain of the neighborhood cats that Julia fed in secret. She felt she was the mistress of this small, safe world where should do as she pleased with her days; where Anna alone was allowed to enter; and where everyone except her mother respected her desire for childhood solitude.

Theo's words had seeped into her and calmed her immediately. The 'we' had been an epiphany, revealing to her a new identity founded on the strength of love. It existed both inside her and outside, through Theo. Never again would there be emptiness. Mama Fina had been right: there was magic in words. The 'we' had eclipsed her fear.

Comprendía, entonces, que la vida nos da montones de provisiones para nuestras travesías por el desierto. Todo lo que había adquirido de manera activa o pasiva, todo lo que había aprendido voluntariamente o por ósmosis, volvía a mí como las verdaderas riquezas de mi existencia, cuando lo había perdido todo.

I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.

I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.

I knew of no instruction manual for reaching a higher level of humanity and a greater wisdom. But I felt intuitively that laughter was the beginning of wisdom, as is was indispensable for survival.

I told myself that I'd had life too easy, conditioned by an upbringing where fear of change was disguised as caution.

He looked at the world from above. Where I saw threatening waves, he saw tranquil water.

If you believe what you say, words become reality.