Amanda Lindhout

“I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.”

“Hillary Clinton has a strong and powerful voice regarding ending violence against women and girls.”

“Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.”

“I went through an extremely trying ordeal, but I never forgot the world outside was a beautiful place.”

“I must thank my good friend Nigel Brennan. His strength of character in the midst of extreme hardship inspired me during the darkest days. Despite our separation, he always managed to find small ways to remind me that there are gentlemen in the world, even when I was surrounded by just the opposite.”

“After spending 460 days as a hostage, I did emerge a fundamentally changed person. But I think, like everyone does as they grow older and probably wiser, I can look back at my earlier life - my history, my mistakes, the joy I felt as a young woman traveling the world - with some objectivity and even some humor.”

“What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.”

“The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.”

“It is an obvious fact that you can never look ahead with clarity at your own future or anybody else's. You can't know what will happen until it happens. Or maybe it dawns on you the split second before, when you get a glimpse of your own fate.”

“The road to recovery will not always be easy, but I will take it one day at a time, focusing on the moments I've dreamed about for so long.”

“Somalia is very dangerous, and no one knows that better than I.”

“Because travel has always been such a vital part of myself and so essential to who I am, I have made the decision to continue to put myself back out into the world. And that's not an easy decision to make.”

“Friendships that don't fit my life anymore have faded away, and new ones have come in.”

“I'm afraid of elevators, because they are an enclosed space, but I get in.”

“What a woman is taught, she shares with her family.”

“Maintaining my dignity is so important for me.”

“What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves”

“I made a vow to myself while I was a hostage that if I were lucky enough to live and to get out of Somalia, I would do something meaningful with my life - and specifically something that would be meaningful in the country where I'd lost my freedom.”

“It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.”

“For a while, the world for me was like a set of monkey bars. I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms... would give out, and I'd fall to the ground.”