Once you don't have freedom and you're obliged to do many things you don't want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be - and you can lose yourself.

Whatever you could do with your hands was important because it kept you in a motion of being able to produce something, and producing something kept you balanced in a way.

Sometimes you hear in the United States that in Columbia there is a war between rich and poor, between people that are defending the poor and the rich.

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

It's important for me to fight for principles. But I am not willing to cope with the nastiness of politics anymore and the endless destructive confrontations that it leads to.

I was struggling against corruption and the only thing... my only weapon was to put the truth in the medias and of course it made me win lots of enemies that didn't want me to just denounce what was happening.

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

If you begin to have a relationship where you're doing what the guards want, and once you're out you will see that as a treason, a treason to your country, a treason to yourself, a treason to everybody, so you have to be very cautious on what is the perspective you're looking at yourself, and you have always to see yourself like from the outside.

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

I realized that I hated politics. I mean that is you know... I realized being in the jungle that what I had thought I could do, I mean changing the way politics were being done in Colombia, was not possible the way I wanted to do it - by confronting, by denouncing.

Nothing that I can encounter today can be as bad as what is behind me. There are small things that used to upset me, but now I just think: Who cares?

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

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

If my goal is to change Colombia, which it is because I really think Columbia has to change in many, many ways - I think it has to be a very profound, nearly spiritual maturing process in the Colombian society because I think you have to first be aware of what's happening and it's not easy because many people don't want to see what's happening.

I knew of no instruction manual for reaching a higher level of humanity and a greater wisdom. But I felt intuitively that laughter was the beginning of wisdom, as is was indispensable for survival.

It is said that the compensation for the effort courage, tenacity, and endurance displayed during the journey was not happiness. Nor glory. What God offered as a reward was only rest.

People need space to survive.

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

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