Luol Deng Quotes

I know what it's like when you are a refugee, living on the mercy of others and having to adjust.

In Kurdistan, there's a lot of hardship - a lot of wars, a lot of bitter and difficult lifestyles. And witnessing all those made me a director.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

I went all out to help these migrants because I was a migrant, too, who came to Mumbai with a lot of dreams. When I saw photographs of their sufferings and read heart-wrenching stories of how they are walking thousands of kilometers without food and water, it reminded me of my early days.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.

I remember when I was a kid, as a refugee in Egypt, every day, there was always a hope that we'd get to leave tomorrow and we'd get to go somewhere.

When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.

If I'm doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I'll go to her tent; I'll follow her when she's working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.

Persevere and preserve yourselves for better circumstances.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

Tough times don't last, but tough people do. And I've been through some tough times, and I know a lot of people can recall tough times, and maybe are going through some tough times right now, but they don't last.

No matter how cold you are or how hungry you are, you might be warm tomorrow.

One man’s exile is but a drop in the sea of human misery

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

We were not defeated. We had been refugees. Now we were freedom fighters.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

Our family get-togethers are about the stories such as my uncle who walked across the Indo-Burma border, or a woman who gave birth in a ship carrying refugees etc.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Amazing how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

I grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda, and I lived there for 30 years. That shapes one's character.

I think one of the first things to go as people's lives start to go down is their dreams. Dreams should be the last thing to go - dreams are the things you go down with. If you're left clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean, I'd put on it the word dreams.

While every refugee's story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage - the courage not only to survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives.