240 pages
Rating: (3.3K votes)
“I knew God gave me these dreams. How could I give up on them?”
“The thing about dreams, though, is they usually sound crazy to everyone but you. All it takes is one other person to buy into them to keep you going.”
“War is always far worse on the poor than the rich. Always.”
“I looked up at the giant Jumbotron television screen. There on the screen I saw President Bush, standing, saluting the flag. They then split the image in half. On one side was the president, his hand over his heart. On the other side was me, Lopez Lomong, the lost boy carrying the flag of his new home. I am no longer a lost boy or an orphan. The flag in my hand is my identity; it is who I am now and who I never was before.”
“The thing about dreams, though, is they usually sound crazy to everyone but you.”
“I walked down the track, beaming with pride. God had brought me so far, through war, through eating garbage and running to forget about my empty stomach. No matter what I went through, God was always with me. He had always had this moment planned for me through both the good times and the bad, from the killing fields of Sudan to these Olympic Games and back again.”
“I do not know how we could run so far and so fast and so long. We did not run with our own strength but with strength from God. That is the only explanation. The”
“I learned lots of things those first few weeks. First and foremost, I learned what it meant to be a refugee. From the moment I stepped into Kakuma, I became a boy without a country. A refugee camp is a kind of no-man’s-land. No one lives there by choice. You end up in places like Kakuma when you have no better option. Everyone who lived there just wanted to go home.”
“Watching people run on television was a revelation for me. Never before had I thought of running as a sport. When I ran, I did not think about conditions in the camp or the hunger in my belly. Running was my therapy, my release, my escape from the world around me.”
“There was another casualty of the September 11 attacks that very few people knew about at the time. In the wake of the attacks, the United States halted the program that brought me and many other lost boys to America. Heightened concerns over security left officials wary that terrorists might sneak into the country posing as lost boys.”
“This is the role of the mother. And in that visit I really saw clearly, for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and also cuddles... but because in an interesting and and maybe an eerie and other worldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.”
“foolish men say things in anger that they later regret and an angry tongue does not mean one is guilty.”
“Il mondo gira come questo fuso... e la sola certezza è che il bene e il male si avvicenderanno sempre. Senza cambiamento non può crescere nulla di nuovo, e quando i vecchi disegni si ripetono questo accade in modo nuovo... Il volto della Signora cambia ma il suo potere persiste, il re che dona la sua vita per la terra rinasce per ripetere il suo sacrificio. A volte anch'io nutro dei timori, ma ho visto passare troppi inverni per non credere che dopo verrà sempre la primavera...”
“In the stories of old, a hero is the one who sweeps in with a drawn sword and noble face, to kill the Dragon and free the princess. In the stories of old it never seems to dawn on the princess that she should be careful not to put herself at mercy of those who would do her ill in the first place.
I don't live in the stories of old.”
“She's my friend, the boy said simply. That's who she is and that's enough for me. As Minli looked at the buffalo boy, aglow with happiness against his poor surroundings, she saw it was enough for him. More than enough, as the smile that kept curling up on his face told her.”
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