Not Even My Name Quotes

“Breath is God’s gift. Life is our reward. The rest is up to us.”
― Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story

“Not only were the young Turks unaware of their past, but the Turkish Government was “buying history” at American universities by giving them large endowments to keep its barbaric past from the American university agenda—a past filled with such atrocities that it had inspired Hitler. “Who remembers the Armenians?” Hitler had asked to justify his slaughter of the Jews and other designated enemies of the state. Indeed. And who even knew the Pontic Greeks ever existed?”
― Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story

“I made it a point to think of them to keep them alive in my heart.”
― Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story

“I couldn’t tell what my mother was feeling. I only knew that I felt as if I had found some precious, mysterious thing I could never name, but that I had searched for my entire life, and now it was finally within reach.”
― Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story

“But the most dramatic change in Turkey was the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians, and 353,000 Pontic Greeks, and the cruel death marches to exile of 1.5 million more Greeks of Turkey; death marches on which countless other Pontians lost their lives, all between 1915 and 1923. This genocide, euphemistically termed “ethnic cleansing,” and “relocation,” eliminated most, if not all, of the Christian minorities in Turkey, and brought to a tragic end the 3,000 year history of the Pontic Greeks in Asia Minor.”
― Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story

“It seemed that our family had been on this land for thousands of years; that we had sprung from the earth, born of its flesh like a tree or a flower, deep-rooted, not by our feet, but by our hearts.”
― Thea Halo, Not Even My Name