“I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.”

“I want to go to my country, if I can go back with the substance of freedom in my hand; and if you do not give us freedom, you will have to give me a grave here”

“In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”

“Freedom is something that you give yourself and no one else can ever take away.”

“In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.”

“Don't you see?" he said. "This could go on for another five years, another ten years, and then where would we be? You want to grow old waiting for something that's never going to happen? Is that what you want?”