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.”
“He looks like the kind of boy who would jump trains, strum guitars, and pass a joint.”
“When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.”
“Life is fragile Grace – it is no more than a petal of cherry blossom; thriving and in full bloom one minute and blown to the ground by a sudden gust of wind the next. We shouldn’t take our life for granted and we should do whatever we can to make ourselves happy.’ She”
“If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living. Synthetic”
“The lesson: The power of your story isn’t just a way to connect to your ultimate consumer but is also a means of making you attractive to potential partners who want to attach themselves to something deeper than buying and selling.”
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