Top 71 Ishmael Beah Quotes
#1. It isn't about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along.
Ishmael Beah
#2. This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy.
Ishmael Beah
#3. The sun's brightness painted our shadows on the ground.
Ishmael Beah
#4. We had not only lost our childhood in the war but our lives had been tainted by the same experiences that still caused us great pain and sadness.
Ishmael Beah
#5. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past. (page 20)
Ishmael Beah
#6. I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end ...
Ishmael Beah
#7. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#8. I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?
Ishmael Beah
#9. Sometimes a story does not make immediate sense - one has to listen and keep it in one's heart, in one's blood, until the day it will become useful. The
Ishmael Beah
#10. You can only threaten someone with hell if they have never had hell
Ishmael Beah
#11. Children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.
Ishmael Beah
#12. If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.
Ishmael Beah
#13. Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.
Ishmael Beah
#14. Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.
Ishmael Beah
#15. Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.
Ishmael Beah
#17. I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.
Ishmael Beah
#18. My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.
Ishmael Beah
#20. My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'
Ishmael Beah
#21. I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.
Ishmael Beah
#22. My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.
Ishmael Beah
#23. Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more
Ishmael Beah
#24. The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer.
Ishmael Beah
#25. It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.
Ishmael Beah
#26. I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.
Ishmael Beah
#27. My conception of New York City came from rap music. I envisioned it as a place where people shot each other on the street and got away with it; no one walked on the streets, rather people drove in their sports cars looking for nightclubs and for violence.
Ishmael Beah
#28. We danced and laughed into the morning. But gradually we stopped. It was as if we all knew that we could be happy for only a brief moment.
Ishmael Beah
#29. In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.
Ishmael Beah
#30. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#31. We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.
Ishmael Beah
#32. The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That's when it's newsworthy. When the war ends, it's not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most important part. It's when people have to rebuild.
Ishmael Beah
#33. I was glad to see other faces and at the same time disappointed that the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people.
Ishmael Beah
#34. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#35. Some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves, their family and communities ... This was one of the consequences of civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you.
Ishmael Beah
#36. I wanted to see my family, even if it meant dying with them.
Ishmael Beah
#37. I only liked talking to her because I felt that she didn't judge me for what I had been a part of; she looked at me with the same inviting eyes and welcoming smile that said I was a child.
Ishmael Beah
#38. I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn't. The war memories had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think
Ishmael Beah
#39. It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it. I have been rehabilitated now, so don't be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child.
Ishmael Beah
#40. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#41. We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food.
Ishmael Beah
#42. What happens in the context of war is that, in order for you to make a child into a killer, you destroy everything that they know, which is what happened to me and my town. My family was killed, all of my family, so I had nothing.
Ishmael Beah
#43. I was still hesitant to let myself let go, because I still believed in the fragility of happiness.
Ishmael Beah
#44. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#45. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#46. As a child soldier, your rights are constantly violated.
Ishmael Beah
#47. That morning we thanked the men who had helped bury Saidu. "You will always know where he is laid," one of the men said. I nodded in agreement, but I know that the chances of coming back to the village were slim, as we had no control over our future. We know only how to survive.
Ishmael Beah
#48. As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.
Ishmael Beah
#49. There's so much focus and interest about what happens during war, but very little about what happens when people return to homes and communities that have been destroyed. There's a renewal that happens, but it's a very difficult one.
Ishmael Beah
#50. This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you. (page 37)
Ishmael Beah
#51. I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.
Ishmael Beah
#52. I had gone to a talent show - I was interested in American hip-hop music - with my older brother, to another town, and my town was attacked. I went from having an entire family to the next minute not having anything. It was very painful.
Ishmael Beah
#53. I grew up as a Muslim. I went to an Islamic elementary school. Most of my community was Muslim, so I grew up praying five times a day.
Ishmael Beah
#54. But what was more violent than making people disbelieve in the worth of their own lives? What was more violent than making them believe they deserved less and less every day?
Ishmael Beah
#55. We all knew that we could grieve only for a short while in order to continue staying alive.
Ishmael Beah
#56. 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.
Ishmael Beah
#57. I knew I could never forget my past, but I wanted to stop talking about it so that I would be fully present in my new life.
Ishmael Beah
#58. Most of the staff members were like that; they returned smiling after we hurt them. It was as if they had made a pact not to give up on us.
Ishmael Beah
#59. There's a saying in the oral tradition of storytelling that when you tell a story, when you give out a story, it is no longer yours; it belongs to everyone who encounters it and everyone who takes it in.
Ishmael Beah
#60. I learned that you are not free until you stop others from making you feel worthless. Because if you do not, you will eventually accept that you are worthless.
Ishmael Beah
#61. This wasn't a place for illusions; the reality here was the genuine happiness that came about from the natural magic of standing next to someone and being consumed by the fortitude in his or her humanity.
Ishmael Beah
#62. During this lesson, teach them how to absorb knowledge as opposed to just memorizing. Teach them to become individual thinkers and not part of the majority that agrees with what is popular
afraid to stand alone in their thinking.
Ishmael Beah
#63. This isn't your fault, you know. It really isn't. You'll get though this. (page 151)
Ishmael Beah
#64. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.
Ishmael Beah
#65. Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.
Ishmael Beah
#66. Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.
Ishmael Beah
#67. I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories.
Ishmael Beah
#68. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed.
Ishmael Beah
#69. We all have that capacity to lose our humanity when circumstances force us to do so. It's not specific to people who live in Africa or Latin America or Asia. And equally, we are capable of regaining ourselves.
Ishmael Beah
#70. This days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another.
Ishmael Beah
#71. We all find joy and radiance and a reason to move on even in the most dire of circumstances. Even in chaos and madness, there's still a beauty that comes from just the vibrancy of another human spirit.
Ishmael Beah
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