I am not irresponsible.

I owe everything to France.

People need space to survive.

I never say no to an ice cream.

I don't want to be submerged by depression.

I love Colombia's military. I love my country.

The voice of the Holy Father was like a light.

I was forbidden to talk to my fellow hostages.

I have shed many tears of pain and indignation.

I continue to aspire to serve Colombia as president.

The relationship with time changes when you're captive.

If you believe what you say, words will become reality.

Reconciliation is a decision that you take in your heart.

It's not easy to talk about things that are still hurting.

I didn't want to be a number. I didn't want to be an object.

You only can rest when have the truth, even when it's horrible.

More than a victim, I am a survivor of a dehumanization process.

I want to serve my country, but not necessarily in the political arena.

I called my party the Green Oxygen party because Colombians were choking.

I studied political science at the Ecole de Sciences Politiques in Paris.

You need tremendous spirituality to stop yourself falling into the abyss.

I have to forget in order to find peace in my soul and be able to forgive.

France is my home; you are my family. I am carrying all of you in my heart.

I know that I have to give testimony about all the things I lived, but I need time.

We're humans. Why always turn human attitude into political behaviours? I hate that.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

Hostages want to survive - they are very focused on their own little view of things.

It's easy when you have suffered to feel the link with what others have gone through.

I lived for nearly seven years with the awareness that death was my everyday companion.

In a kidnapping, you leave behind a lot of your baggage, like arrogance and stubbornness.

I carry the voices of all my family within me, and they were with me there in the jungle.

Our life capital is measured in seconds. Once those seconds are gone, we never get them back!

I think there is this sensation of being deprived of something that you are entitled to have.

After six years without seeing one, I love just seeing a smile - every smile I see gives me hope.

Reconciliation is a national decision that has to be debated and a consensus made among Colombians.

I continue with the illusion of serving Colombia. Only God knows if it were to be from the presidency.

I had this belief that I couldn't just accept to be treated as an object. It was a problem of dignity.

At first, I didn't want to accept that I had been abducted. I kept thinking, 'Next week, I'll be freed.'

The only thing I've settled in my mind is that I want to forgive, and forgiveness comes with forgetting.

What we have in Colombia is a war against the poor and the guerillas from the left side are against the poor.

I think there is limits to the assumption that wherever you are, the situation in a way tells you how to behave.

Sometimes I'm fragile, sometimes too emotional, but I'm putting everything I can on my side to be a happy person.

I want to tell President Sarkozy - and through him, all the French people - that they were our support, our light.

I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.

In the free world, your days pass very quickly because you have so many things to do, and you're in control of your life.

I think that the worst thing is realizing that mankind - that - that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.

We can't continue with a justice of vengeance. Peace will require us to accept a certain degree of impunity; it's inevitable.

In the jungle, faith also became something very real; it helped me to understand what was happening to me and changed my questions.

Before I was abducted, I think that happiness was related to success. Nowadays happiness is related, for me, to rest, peace, serenity.

We have to be aware of our fragilities as human beings - when we see cruelty, to understand that in certain conditions, we could be cruel, too.

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