Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

Even when I get on airplanes, very often, as I walk down the aisle, I notice a lot of people staring or whispering. I recognize the fact that yes, to a lot of people, I will always be that 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and who was held captive.

I'm grateful for rain because, when I was kidnapped, that meant that I had something to drink.

The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught.

This wasn't the first time I'd woken up as a captive. It wasn't even the second. I so needed to reevaluate my life choices.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

It would be a lie to say that people are coming to adoption with joy at all times. Hope, perhaps, but it would be disingenuous to say that every part coming to an adoption isn't seriously grieving.

It's... a hard thing for a director, to think you came up with a shot, something from your mind, and someone died while doing it. It's the worst thing you'll ever have to live with. It was very hard for me to get back on the horse again.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things.

I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn't go so well.

When they first grabbed us, yeah, it terrified, but they calmed me down.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.

I wanted it not to be true. I wanted it not to be her plane. I wanted it - I wanted, if it was her plane, to have somehow survived because she was in the back of the airplane. But we know that doesn't happen, not with those sorts of things.

For me, my awakening came when I was kidnapped.

Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.

It is as if I were setting out into captivity; better were it for me to die here

I didn't want to accept that people would forget me, that the government wouldn't do anything to negotiate our freedom. After a year, I came to understand that not only had one year passed, many more would come.

When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.

In a kidnapping, you leave behind a lot of your baggage, like arrogance and stubbornness.

'Closure' is the word used for a loss that's not acknowledged - and the habit this causes, physically and mentally, for anybody who is participating in that.

Every day, I feel like it's the day I was freed from Daesh. Every time I speak about my story, I feel like it's the day I was liberated.

If I was to pretend my father didn't exist and I didn't have anything to remember him by, then it wouldn't be healthy.

The kidnapped person is so tantalizingly close, kept alive by a devastating hope. Kidnapping or hostage-taking is perhaps the most disturbing form of terror because it turns this hope into a liability that can paralyze.

It takes certain kind of naiveté, or perhaps just stupidity, to know things will end and still hope otherwise.