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
“Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
“We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”
― Nicola Yoon, quote from The Sun Is Also a Star
“Whatever! Go save a dolphin or something!"
He whirled around. "It's a whale, Alex, a whale! That's what I'm interested in saving."
I threw up my arms. "What's wrong with saving dolphins?”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Daimon
“What happens to men sometimes,' his father wants to tell Charlie, 'is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,— and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want it, any of it, and they'll back away in fear.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Mason & Dixon
“Maybe," she said. "Maybe. But now you're making promises you might not be able to keep, and that's how people in love get very badly hurt.”
― Ransom Riggs, quote from Library of Souls
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