Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

It took awhile for me to get used to speaking candidly about my own life. I got into it, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.

Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom.

From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

The power of storytelling is to free us from isolation, shame, and whatever the situation.

Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.

A heart that hurts is a heart that works.

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.

My military experience... I can recall so many different emotions from that.

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there - with your eyes open - and lived to see it.

People who keep journals have life twice

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present.

I learned long ago that in order to heal my wounds, I must have the courage to face up with them.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

I'm not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.