Naomi Benaron > Quotes

“Your hope is the most beautiful and the saddest in the world.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“Wherever God spends the day, He comes home to sleep in Rwanda.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“In Europe, his contacts apologized and said there was nothing they could do. They would keep trying, but no one was listening. Rwanda had no oil or strategic interest, no diamonds or gold.”
― Naomi Benaron

“How much this book of life changes, he thought. And we are not the ones to write the pages.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“If we all die, who will tell the world what happened here? Who will bring justice for all these unjust deaths?”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“This cycle of hope and disappointment breaks my heart every day.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“It is love, the teeth told him, that resurrects life from death. Leave us here. Turn your head to the living.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“...Of course there was no word in the American papers, and no one at the State Department had a clue- at least not that they shared.'...'No one back home cares about a few African children more or less in the world. It's business as usual to them.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“Death and injury lay down with him at night, and when he wakes, they are there to kiss him good morning.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“In her recent New York Times op-ed, “And the Winner Isn’t . . . ,” which addresses the failure of the fiction judges to pick a winner for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, Ann Patchett states, “Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“I wonder if we will ever be able to go back to speaking as we used to, living from one day to the next without memory seizing us by the throat.”
― Naomi Benaron