Immaculée Ilibagiza · 214 pages
Rating: (33.7K votes)
“The love of a single heart can make a world of difference.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“I knew that my heart and mind would always be tempted to feel anger--to find blame and hate. But I resolved that when the negative feelings came upon me, I wouldn't wait for them to grow or fester. I would always turn immediately to the Source of all true power: I would turn to God and let His love and forgiveness protect and save me.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“But I came to learn that God never shows us something we aren't ready to understand. Instead, He lets us see what we need to see, when we need to see it. He'll wait until our eyes and hearts are open to Him, and then when we're ready, He will plant our feet on the path that's best for us...but it's up to us to do the walking.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“They can only kill us once.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“Instead of negotiating or begging for mercy, [my brother Damascene] challenged them to kill him. "Go ahead," he said. "What are you waiting for? Today is my day to go to God. I can feel Him all around us. He is watching, waiting to take me home. Go ahead--finish your work and send me to paradise. I pity you for killing people like it's some kind of child's game. Murder is no game: If you offend God, you will pay for your fun. The blood of the innocent people you cut down will follow you to your reckoning. But I am praying for you. . . I pray that you see the evil you're doing and ask God's forgiveness before it's too late.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“Author says her father was so diplomatic that when people came to him for solutions, people not only accepted them, but they believed they thought of them.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“This is the same power that I feel propelling me forward into the next phase of my life. God saved my soul and spared my life for a reason: He left me to tell my story to others and show as many people as possible the healing power of His love and forgiveness.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“I came to learn that God never shows us something we aren’t ready to understand. Instead, He lets us see what we need to see, when we need to see it. He’ll wait until our eyes and hearts are open to Him, and then when we’re ready, He will plant our feet on the path that’s best for us . . . but it’s up to us to do the walking.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“The world had seen the same thing happen many times before. After it happened in Nazi Germany, all the big, powerful countries swore, “Never again!” But here we were, six harmless females huddled in darkness, marked for execution because we were born Tutsi. How had history managed to repeat itself? How had this evil managed to surface once again? Why had the devil been allowed to walk among us unchallenged, poisoning hearts and minds until it was too late?”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“Cuando yo es imposible para nosotros cambiar una situacion, el reto es cambiarnos a nosotros mismos.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“I see thunderstorms around us now, but these are just baby storms,” the psychic told her. “The mother storm is coming. When she arrives, her lightning will scorch the land, her thunder will deafen us, and her heavy rain will drown us all. The storm will last for three months and many will die. Those who escape will find no one to turn to—every friendly face will have perished.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“We carried on like that through letters and phone calls for the next two years. And things didn’t change when Aimable graduated as a doctor of veterinary medicine”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“That night I prayed with a clear conscience and a clean heart. For the first time since I entered the bathroom, I slept in peace.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
“However, Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN peacekeepers, refused to obey his orders to leave and remained with a couple hundred soldiers. He was a brave and moral man, but he was also alone in a sea of killers. We heard him often on the radio begging for someone, anyone, to send troops to Rwanda to stop the slaughter, but no one listened to him. Belgium, our country’s former colonial ruler, had been the first to pull its soldiers out of the country; meanwhile, the United States wouldn’t even acknowledge that the genocide was happening!”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, quote from Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Immaculée Ilibagiza
Born place: Rwanda
See more on GoodReads
“He smacked the heel of his hand against his forhead, as if that could knock the mental picture out of his head. Hell, he though irritably, he didn't want to knock the image just out of his head. He wanted to send it clear across the room and out the window.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Brighter Than the Sun
“Depression, in Karla's experience, was a dull, inert thing - a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn't sit, it assailed. It hurt her. In the mornings, it slapped her so hard in the face that she reeled as she walked to the bathroom.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from The Believers
“This time of year," she said, "people’s consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the ‘less fortunate.’" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "But God forbid anyone should address why they’re poor in the first place, or try to change the structures that keep them poor. Then the ‘less fortunate’ turn into ‘welfare queens’ and ‘derelicts.’ But if I were a lobbyist whoring on behalf of some transnational corporation, I’d never hear the word ‘derelict.’"
"So when it comes to taking care of poor people," I said, "if Mother Teresa is the Hallmark card, then you’re the electric bill.”
― Jeri Smith-Ready, quote from Requiem for the Devil
“My mother made a sound that from a lesser woman would have been a snort.”
― Josh Lanyon, quote from Fatal Shadows
“Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn't look out, they would make us live in cages too.
So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares.
Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn't do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren't happy and didn't feel free. You made all the cages, the you wondered why you didn't feel free.”
― Kent Nerburn, quote from Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder
The Edible Woman
Skybreaker
Blue Diary
Savages
My Soul to Lose
Growth of the SoilBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
