Kamisese Mara Quotes

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

… prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

When your house is on fire—that is not the time to talk

Oh my God. My God. It’s all over.

I went camping one time when I was twelve, to the Great Lakes. My friend stepped in really deep muddy water and started screaming and sinking. My mom ran up, and I was just standing there a foot away and wouldn't stick out my hand to pull him up. So I'm probably not the best person to take on a camping trip.

The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.

Everything in Haiti right now is a priority.

If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

My life has been a series of emergencies.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

People who live through transplants or disasters like Sept. 11 are survivors.

The time when people really want government is in an emergency.

Get down, you fool!

American government has seemed to mean naught but impotence and unavailing words.

The most bitter pain among men: to have much knowledge but little power.

No one will be harmed. You have nothing to fear. You will all be evacuated.

If we do not act now, we will become spectators to slaughter.

There's nothing worse in life than to sit there and be the victim of a process that's outside your control.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

There are some things which are so horrific that some people feel they can't do anything about it: that the natural, understandable response is to tune it out.

When people are in crisis and pose a threat to themselves or others, those closest to them are often the first to see the warning signs.

I had a recurring stress dream since I was a kid 10 years old. My friend Travis is driving, and I'm afraid we're going to get in trouble. We keep passing people I recognize, and no one is doing anything. Travis keeps driving faster. I've had that dream a long time.

After the tragic events of Manchester, with the senseless loss of life and the fear that came from knowing my family was unsafe and that I was completely powerless to protect them, I went to a very dark place with no tools to handle the feelings that came along with the devastation of the attack.