Alek Wek Quotes

Dragged out of your bed at the age of seven, my mother screaming, six kids under the age of 12. I'm not equating my experience with the people who lived in Northern Ireland. But my dad was always out and about late at night, and I could not go to sleep until I knew he was in.

The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who 'disappeared'. That's what the candle is for.

As a child, I grew up in fear. When I was four, all my other relatives were deported to the countryside, having to leave most of their personal belongings behind.

May 20, 2017, was one of the scariest days of my life. It was the day I realized I was being hunted by Erdogan.

I still receive very regular death threats that make it impossible for me to return to Indonesia. I think I could get in, but I don't think I could get out again.

Most of the things I do are inspired by things that frightened me when I was young.

When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid - entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.

My friends and family in Turkey could be arrested just for talking to me.

Growing up, I was afraid of the dark.

For an overwhelming majority of my life, my country has been a source of pain, fear, and embarrassment.

From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.

I was obsessed with clowns. My dad had to get rid of them. I thought there were clowns under my bed for years.

I've always felt that if you back down from a fear, the ghost of that fear never goes away. It diminishes people.

The first thing you should know about me is when I was three years old my mother left me and my father. And that was traumatic obviously for my father - he suffered a nervous breakdown at that time in his life.

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here's the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of other kids.

Everyone is an abused child, if you think about what governments do.

In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.

It was only for two years, and I jumped from family to family. It's very scary.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

The two things I feared as a boy most were rattlesnakes and white people.

My distress is that our friends in East Tennessee are being hanged and driven to despair, and even now I fear, are thinking of taking rebel arms for the sake of personal protection. In this we lose the most valuable stake we have in the South

If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.