What You Have Heard Is True Quotes

“It was as if he had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“People think that what happens to someone else has nothing to do with them. They think that what happens in one place doesn’t matter any place else.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel once said, “it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government, is corruption—that, and the use of force, which is always applied against those who have not been convinced or included. He was always talking about corruption: trying to prevent it, expose it, eradicate it. He was dedicated to the task of bringing the sin to the eye. “This is the stage of denunciation,” he said, “which precedes the revolutionary moment.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“...it was becoming obvious that the war he had been anticipating, "in three to five years" might have already begun, as many wars do begin, he said, not with a major event reported in the news but with sufferings barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“Draw, Antonio, draw, said Michelangelo to one of his apprentices. Draw and do not waste time.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“You are always asking me why the people don’t do something, why they put up with this brutality, why they don’t rise up against it, this and that. Okay. You’re exhausted, you’re shocked, you’re sick to your stomach, and you feel dirty. These things are what people feel every day here—and you expect them to get themselves organized? You expect them to fight back? Could you fight back at this moment?”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“Lesson number four: If someone promises to do great things, ask them first for something small, like a bridge or a cow.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“palimpsests”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“This means,” she said, “that they can arrest anyone at any time for any reason. They have legalized their repression. It is against the law to oppose them in any way. But, Carolina, only the lucky ones are arrested under this law. Only the lucky ones have a trial.” We were talking in the dark after the girls went to bed. “What happens to the unlucky?” “What happens? They are disappeared. They become desaparecidos. We don’t know after that, unless the corpse is found, and even then we don’t know because they are, how do you say it? Beyond recognition.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“She began reciting something that sounded almost like litany: Aguilares, Padre Grande, Padre Navarro, aquí en San Salvador y en Aguilares y campesinos, “hundreds, three hundreds, all dead, even niños dead.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“After beating Lorca with their rifle butts and calling him a faggot, they filled him with bullets. The grave, sought by many, has never been found.”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

“Let me tell you about a priest,” Leonel said, “Padre Rutilio Grande—did Claribel happen to mention him?”
― Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance