Ishmael Beah Quotes

In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.

We must strive to be like the moon

Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.

My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stop trusting each other, and every stranger becomes an enemy.

I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.

This days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another.

ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end.

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.

My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.

...children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.

I was still hesitant to let myself let go, because I still believed in the fragility of happiness.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?

I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.

The sun's brightness painted our shadows on the ground.

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.

Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images.

I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.

Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.

The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer.

It isn't about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along.

Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more