Zlata Filipović · 240 pages
Rating: (7.8K votes)
“It looks to me as though these politics mean Serbs, Croats and Muslims. But they are all people. They are all the same. They all look like people, there's no difference. They all have arms, legs and heads, they walk and talk, but now there's "something" that wants to make them different.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“War is no joke, it seems. It destroys, kills, burns, separates, brings unhappiness.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“How you can come to love an animal! She doesn't talk, but she speaks with her eyes, her paws, her meows, and I understand her.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“I keep thinking about the march I joined today. It's bigger and stronger than war. That's why it will win. The people must be the ones to win, not the war, because war has nothing to do with humanity. War is something inhuman.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“It’s as if Sarajevo is slowly dying, disappearing. Life is disappearing. So how can I feel spring, when spring is something that awakens life, and here there is no life, here everything seems to have died.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“Why is politics making us unhappy, separating us, when we ourselves know who is good and who isn’t? We mix with the good, not with the bad. And among the good there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims, just as there are among the bad. I simply don’t understand it. Of course, I’m “young,” and politics are conducted by “grown-ups.” But I think we “young” would do it better. We certainly wouldn’t have chosen war. The”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“Some people compare me with Anne Frank. That frightens me, Mimmy. I don’t want to suffer her fate.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“…young people without arms and legs. They’re the ones who had the fortune or perhaps the misfortune to survive.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“Suddenly, unexpectedly, someone is using the ugly powers of war, which horrify me, to try to pull and drag me away from the shores of peace, from the happiness of wonderful friendships, playing and love. I feel like a swimmer who was made to enter the cold war, against her will. I feel shocked, sad, unhappy and frightened and I wonder where they are forcing me to go, I wonder why they have taken away the peaceful and lovely shores of my childhood. I used to rejoice at each new day, because each was beautiful in its own way. I used to rejoice at the sun, at playing, at songs. In short, I enjoyed my childhood. I had no need of a better one. I have less and less strength to keep swimming in these cold waters. So take me back to the shores of my childhood, where I was warm, happy and content, like all the children whose childhood and the right to enjoy it are now being destroyed.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“There are lots of beautiful pedigree dogs roaming the streets. Their owners probably had to let them go because they couldn’t feed them anymore. Sad. Yesterday I watched a cocker spaniel cross the bridge, not knowing which way to go. He was lost. He wanted to go forward, but then he stopped, turned around and looked back. He was probably looking for his master. Who knows whether his master is still alive? Even animals suffer here. Even they aren’t spared by the war.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“Politics is making my life miserable!!”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“Our own tiresome sniper, we call him “Jovo,” was in a playful mood today. He’s really out of his mind. There he goes! He just fired another bullet, to shake us up. Ciao!”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“I think we all need to remember our capacity for empathy and through education, stretch ourselves to imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes and wish every person the same pair of shoes that we would like to wear.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“When I feel particularly tired at the end of the day, or when irritability proves that my nerves are tired, I know beyond question that it has been an inefficient day both as to quantity and quality.”
― Dale Carnegie, quote from How To Enjoy Your Life And Your Job
“Your instincts are telling you something. Trust them and listen to them.”
― Ed Viesturs, quote from No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks
“There are few things in this life more bamboo-under-fingernails than good poetry read aloud badly-unless it is bad poetry read aloud badly.”
― Josh Lanyon, quote from Come Unto These Yellow Sands
“I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, quote from The Art of Always Being Right
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