M.I.A. Quotes

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

The thing is, I don't take anything for granted anymore - my family, my music, you name it.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

The war broke out, and for a number of years I lived in darkness, with the memory of the lakes, the trees and the skies of Sweden, until I returned in 1946 to spend two unforgettable years in the laboratory of Hugo Theorell.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope.

I've gone to war zones before and never got shot.

'Each One Lost' I wrote the day after I got home. My week in Afghanistan was a very short trip, but it was a powerful experience.

Doesn't it strike you as queer that I, who couldn't cut the head off a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me.

I've never been to war, and I would never presume to fully understand the horrors that that kind of experience can impart.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

The choices Israelis face and the decisions they make, day in and day out, are literally the difference between life and death. In many ways, I liken their reactions to the way I felt while serving in Iraq.

We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.