Top 35 Clemantine Wamariya Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I could no longer discern what was real and what was fake. Everything, including the present, seemed to be both too much and nothing at all.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

2. “Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection. It was based on the fear of losing them.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

3. “Everywhere you looked you saw people turned to stone. If you touched them, they’d crumble to dust. So they remained still and silent, trying not to shatter.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

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

— Clemantine Wamariya

5. “The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

6. “When you don’t belong to a country, the world decides that you don’t deserve a thing.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

7. “I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion – anything, really – comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

8. “In my version of the story, the girl walks the earth and she is always safe, undeniably strong and brave – a dream, a superstar, a goddess of sorts. I needed to believe those things were possible and that they might be true about me too.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

9. “Often adults said to me, “You’re so strong, you’re so brave.” But I didn’t want to be strong, I didn’t want to be brave. I wanted a fresh, fluffy brain, one that was not tormented by wars and fear. I wanted to backtrack in time to a world of innocence, to regress into the landscape of The Boxcar Children. It was so nice there.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

10. “Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

11. “It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

12. “Before the Belgians arrived and colonized Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis lived in peace. But colonization is built on the idea that we are not the same, that we don’t possess equal humanity. The Belgians imposed their cruel ideology: their belief that people with certain-sized skulls and certain-width noses were better and smarter than others, that they belonged to a superior race. This ideology leached into the Rwandan psyche and caused the country to self-destruct.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

13. “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.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

14. “All those countries that ended World War II by saying never again turned their backs.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

15. “I wanted to retain the right to disappear. Remaining in place, nesting – it sets off fears that somebody would yank me away. To counter it, I had to flee. I had to reassure myself that I still knew how to escape.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

16. “But people need to know, people need to say to themselves, ‘I cannot do this thing because this thing is unforgivable. I cannot decide my wife is a cockroach. I cannot decide my neighbor is a snake. I cannot kill my wife. I cannot kill my neighbor. I cannot make others less than human and then kill them. This is unforgivable. This will never be forgiven.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

17. “Two people in pain are magnets, repelling each other. We cannot or will not reach across the space to connect.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

18. “We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anybody else.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

19. “You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try and stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which was also a number. If you died, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

20. “Maintaining my body had been so much work, so costly. Protecting it had been a never-ending battle. It was not a source of joy. I had been dragging it around for thirteen years, trying to keep it from harm. I felt like it stood in my way.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

21. “People there were so kind. There’s a lovely word in Swahili: nishauri. It means “advise me. When someone was mad at you, they would come to your house and sit down and talk and say, This is very disrespectful and I think we should consult each other on how to move forward. Let’s make peace here and come to a conclusion that is beautiful.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

22. “People there were so kind. There’s a lovely word in Swahili: nishauri. It means “advise me.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

23. “I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

24. “I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. Everywhere, and especially at both extremes, you can find monsters. It’s at the extremes that people are most scared...”

— Clemantine Wamariya

25. “You know those little pellets you drop in water that expand into huge sponges? My life was the opposite. Everything shrank.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

26. “I found an essay in a book called Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, in which every time the men go off to war they lose all their language. When they return home they can’t describe to their families what they saw, so they go back to war to learn the words again.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

27. “The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs – they’re all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so-called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another?”

— Clemantine Wamariya

28. “I have never been Claire. I have never been inviolable. 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.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

29. “That’s all a person can do, really: Let others live their lives on their terms, and interrogate how you live your own. Insist on knowing the backstory to your gifts and your pain. Ask yourself how you came to have all the things you carry: your privilege, your philosophy, your nightmares, your faith, your sense of order and peace in the world.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

30. “Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

31. “Now it felt like I did nothing. I had everything and I did nothing.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

32. “We all lived lives my parents never dreamed of us having.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

33. “When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

34. “Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

35. “My refugee skills were kicking in. I wanted to be who I needed to be and get what there was to get. There was a feedback loop that I could now see. If I performed well in my role as a student, people responded with happiness and pride and wanted to pour more resources into me. Fill me up again and again.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

36. “I did not even really know how to access that once-safe place with the outdoor kitchen, the red roof, the birds-of-paradise. Nostalgia was a destructive exercise, a jab at a still-tender wound, stitched up poorly.”

— Clemantine Wamariya

37. “I did not understand the point of the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. 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. It cannot do justice – it is not meant to do justice – to the thing it describes.”

— Clemantine Wamariya