Asne Seierstad Quotes

I see the kids and I feel like taking them all away to a safe place to hide until the war stops and the hunger stops and El Cua becomes strong enough to give them the care they deserve.

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

Israel is not Vegas, and it will not be.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. And now, as in no other age, we seek it because we have been warned, by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself.

Who has gone hungry learns to think of the future and of the children.

The ability to produce every necessity of life renders us independent in war as well as in peace.

Women tend to be more interested in reconciliation. A Kenyan woman leader said to me, "You know, in a war, men and women want different things. The men care a lot about territory. And they care where the borders are. And they want this whole state. The women," she said, "they want a safe place." And she put her fingers like this, "They want a safe place for their children to go to school without being shot, for their daughters to not be raped."

The challenge of ending displacement is inseparable from the challenge of establishing and maintaining peace. When wars end, farmers return to their fields; children return to school; violence against women declines; trade and economic activity resume; medical and other services become more accessible, and the international focus changes from relief to development and self-sufficiency. All this makes new wars less likely. It is a virtuous cycle that deserves nurture and support.

I remember when I was shot down in that war. I remember how terrified I was. And it made me feel close to my family, and to God, and to life, and I was scared.

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.

I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment.

I have lived through war, and lost much. I know what's worth the fight, and what is not. Honor and courage are matters of the bone, and what a man will kill for, he will sometimes die for, too. And that, O kinsman, is why a woman has broad hips; that bony basin will harbor a man and his child alike. A man's life springs from his woman's bones, and in her blood is his honor christened. For the sake of love alone, I would walk through fire again.

Sometimes I have visions of myself driving through hell, selling sulphur and brimstone, or through heaven peddling refreshments to the roaming souls. If me and the children I've got left could find a place where there's no shooting, I wouldn't mind a few years of peace and quiet.

Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions

The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.

For my mother, having a family was the most important thing in her life. In the Second World War, it was a challenge - surviving physically and mentally and finding somebody who you loved and who was willing to be with you.

God has left me alive, so it looks like I'm needed for something ... As soon as there is a possibility for me to return, I will return and will do everything I can to make life better in Ukraine. And today, the main task is to stop the war.

I don't wanna die in a nuclear war, I want to sail away to a distant shore, and make like an apeman.

Real peace is more than the absence of war; it is an absence of the causes of war.

The only time he cries is if he’s hungry. We all have nipples. I don’t care who I offend; my baby wants to eat. If I can’t get a cover over me quick enough, so be it.

I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I'm going to be okay.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

To the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most in situations of conflict.

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.