"I resent and revile [the word genocide]. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie."

"I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close."

"But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home."

"My body is destroyed and my body is sacred. I will not live in that story of ruin and shame."

"I work every day now to erase [the] language of ruin, to destroy it and replace it with language of my own. With konona (rape, ruin), you’re told, there is no antidote, no cleansing agent. […] You’re polluted, you’re worthless—that’s it."

"I needed to see the world in front of me clearly so I could perform my part well. I needed to crack the code. So many times, in my former life, I’d had to become someone else in order to stay out of a refugee camp or out of jail, to stay alive. I had played a mother. I had played a yes ma’am younger sister. I had made myself a nobody, invisible. Now I had to become this strange creature: an American teenager."

"I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all."

"I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty."

"My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating."

"Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times, that I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused."

"In Malawi, I used to write my name in dust on trucks, hoping my mother would see my loopy cursive and realize that I was alive."

"One of the most valuable skills I’d learned while trying to survive as a refugee was reading what other people wanted me to do."

"Staying alive was so much work…. You had to try to stay a person."

"I want to really live in the present, and find love and joy in the world around me."

"There is so much human pain and suffering in the world. I want to honor all those difficult experiences and acknowledge their aftermath."

"We’ve created these categories that divide us as humans, and in doing that, we miss each other. I want to bring people together and remind everyone that they have permission to know themselves and others beyond labels."

"We don’t write about the human emotions of conflicts; we write about the political and economic aftermath. I wanted to write about those feelings."

"It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee."

"Anything to help me connect with my strength beyond suffering."

"My mom says tears are good for your skin.” And maybe your soul, too."

"I was the clever child who induced the fairy godmother to bring her parents back to life."

"The reunion was one of the deepest, most joyful moments."

"I want to be so loud about the experience of killing each other. I want to tap into everyone’s senses, to touch on our human sensibility."

"Every single person on the planet has equal humanity. In my own life I’ve gone from being seen as utterly worthless to [having] great privilege, and nothing about who I am inside has changed. Every person you see seeking refuge, every person you see walking away from their whole life because their country has descended into chaos and war…I am every one of those people. You are every one of those people too…"

"Safety should be a birthright"

"Home is a concept. It’s one of a story that we cling to so deeply. When your home has been really, “here is my couch, here is my this, here is my that,” it becomes like mine. For me, home is where people who are loving are. It could be on the street. It could be inside of a tent. It could be in a place where they’re not given a land, then that is a place called a slum. It could be in the high rises of New York or in the middle of chaos in Mexico City. And the physical piece of a home is so important, especially when the weather—sun, cold—is against you…"