Best Quotes from Free By Lea Ypi by Lea Ypi with Page Numbers

I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.

I felt so free that I often perceived my freedom as a burden and, occasionally, like on that day, as a threat.

Each path raised different questions, and I had to weigh causes and consequences, reflect on their implications and make a decision I knew I might come to regret.

But I decided it was better to let Elona hear the truth, even if it might hurt her, than to lie indefinitely just to keep her happy.

I had to declare that I understood the importance of letting workers carry on with their duties, and that if everyone behaved like me, soon biscuits would disappear from the shops altogether.

I wanted to remember her every word, to evoke her pride and strength when she told us how she was going to defend freedom.

The protesters were mistaken. Nobody was looking for freedom. Everyone was already free, just like me, simply exercising that freedom.

Perhaps both sides were simply chasing each other without knowing who was following whom.

I must defend my freedom too, I thought. It must be possible to overcome my fear.

I hugged Stalin one last time, turned around, stared at the horizon to gauge the distance to my house, took a deep breath and started to run.

"To be free, you have to be alive."

"What happens is important, but who tells the story matters more."

"You have done nothing wrong. You have nothing to fear."

"If you comply with one tyrant, what is the point of fighting another?"

"I could never explain to them what it was like to feel the pressure from my friends."

"The life I lived, inside the walls of the house and outside, was in fact not one life but two."

"It’s not about me, it’s about the quisling man."

"How could she have sympathy for an oppressor of the people?"

"I started to wonder about the story of my life, of how I was born, of how things were before I was there."

"Everything had to be remade from scratch."

'Biography was the universal answer to all kinds of questions, the foundation without which all knowledge was reduced to opinion.'

'Hope is something you have to fight for. But there comes a point when it turns into illusion; it’s very dangerous.'

'Success was always due to the right people making the right choices, fighting for hope when it seemed justified, and interpreting the facts in such a way as to distinguish hope from illusion.'

'In the end, my grandmother said, we are always in charge of our fate.'

'Once you knew those limits, you were free to choose and you became responsible for your decisions.'

'There would be gains and there would be losses. You had to avoid being flattered by victories and learn how to accept defeat.'

'The beauty of chess is that it has nothing to do with biography. It’s all up to you.'

'I started to think of my life as a miraculous adventure story.'

'You came before we were ready. Apart from that, your biography so far is as good as it gets.'

'If you knew the rules, you mastered the game.'

Uncle Enver has passed away. But his work lives on.

When we die, we die. The only thing that lives eternally is the work we have done, the projects we have created, the ideals we leave to others to pursue on our behalf.

The pain is great. We must learn to turn the pain into strength.

Whenever Comrade Enver appeared on the tribune on 1 May, the weather changed, the sun came out from behind the clouds.

The only thing that lives eternally is the work we have done.

If there was one thing that could convince us children of the irrationality of religion, of the ridiculous nature of belief in the existence of God, it was the idea that there could be a life after the one we had.

Science and reason were all that mattered. Only with their help could we find out about nature and the world.

To think that people deserve a different fate from the rest of nature was to be a slave to myth and dogma at the expense of science and reason.

I don’t know if it was embarrassment at being scolded on the wrong day, the sadness for the loss of Uncle Enver, a combination of both, or perhaps something else, entirely unrelated.

We will miss his brilliant guidance, his wise words, his revolutionary passion.

Part of the challenge of growing up was finding out which rules faded over time, which were trumped by other more important obligations, and which ones remained inflexible.

The trick always consisted in knowing which rule was relevant when and, ideally, whether it became looser as time passed.

The mastery of the subtle boundary between following rules and breaking them was, for us children, the true mark of growth, maturity and social integration.

We relied on friends and neighbours for everything.

Behaving respectfully in the queue, or joining forces to uphold queuing standards, could mark the beginning of lasting friendships.

It was essential to let shopping bags, containers or appropriately sized stones take on some of the representative functions that would otherwise have to burden their owners.

I hated to see Donika walk past my mother in silence at the cheese queue, and I missed her reedy, thin voice calling my mother from the window.

Forgive, but never forget.

You must promise me that if you ever again have silly ideas like that about your family, you will come and tell me.

All is forgiven and forgotten.

‘Death to fascism, freedom to the people.’

When I was growing up, I knew something about me was different but could not say what it was.

The weeks when Cocotte visited were the only times I spoke French without reluctance.

I dreamed about a change of fortune, the unexpected intervention of a benevolent stranger, or finding solace in the discovery of a distant relative.

Violence against children was no different from the violence of the state.

‘You must not speak French if it makes you unhappy.’

Education was compulsory and began between the ages of six or seven.

I felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment: pride because I would soon start school, and embarrassment because I was still unable to pronounce ‘collectivization’.

Perhaps she can read from one of the works of Comrade Enver.

‘I know what collectivism means, it means that we all work better when we share things, I just can’t pronounce it.’

Dajti was physically remote but always with us.

‘I saw it last night through Dajti’ meant: ‘I was alive. I broke a law. I was thinking.’

On the relation between my father and the antenna… depended every vital piece of information from abroad that my family received.

I could figure out what they were about.

We wondered why, if people could purchase food any time they wanted, they chose to stockpile it.

In capitalism, people claimed to be free and equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available.

We sympathized with their predicament but did not think we shared their fate.

We knew we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most: real freedom.

In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a poor black person cannot be free.

A tourist did not look like one of us. A tourist could not be one of us.

The secret of freedom is in educating people, while the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

They thought everyone is born free, and equal, and people can think for themselves and have to make their own decisions.

In capitalism, it’s not that the poor are not allowed to do all the things that the rich can do. It’s that they can’t do them, even if they are allowed.

To change the way things are.

One has to do what one can, brigatista, but in the end, to change things, you need a revolution.

Freedom was possible and required resisting authority in all its forms.

You need a revolution, because nobody is going to give up their privileges without being forced.

A brigatista is someone who wants to share all their money.

Unless all those who suffered from injustice everywhere in the world became free, no single, lasting victory could be achieved.

His fascination with revolutionary groups was shaped by his own predicament.

There is so much good stuff around. There is abundance everywhere.

Everything feels so calm and precious.

When you are older you will understand.

Human dignity is inviolable. The foundation of socialism is the dignity conferred by work.

I loved my family. I trusted them.

In my search for certainty, I relied on them to help me make sense of the world.

I had never thought to ask my family not where exactly the universities were located but what a university represented.

It seemed exaggerated to treat Haki as an oppressor of humanity.

Ahmet is back. He wants us to visit.

Who knows what will happen now that the rector has changed?

‘First comes morality, then comes food,’ my grandmother said cheerfully, and I had learned to agree.

The freedom of each must guarantee the freedom of all.

Only the truth is free, and only then does freedom become true.

Dignity has nothing to do with money, honours or titles. I am the same person I always was.

Freedom, she said, is being conscious of necessity.

We did not lose ourselves. We did not lose our dignity.

For my family, there was nothing to explain, to contextualize, or to defend; there was only the pointless destruction of their lives.

Things were one way, and then they were another. I was someone, then I became someone else.

Perhaps the terror was over when I was born. Or perhaps it had not yet started.

My grandmother wanted me to remember her trajectory, and to understand that she was the author of her life.

‘They will vote for freedom,’ I replied. ‘For freedom and democracy.’

‘The Party was clearly wrong about a lot of things. That’s why we have pluralism now.’

‘Maybe it means that when there is pluralism, some parties say God exists, and some others say he doesn’t exist, and whoever wins the election decides what is right.’

‘Everyone can say what they like.’

‘If we don’t vote, we let other people decide for us.’

‘We must go back to sleep,’ my grandmother said.

‘My parents hesitated to vote. They feared losing control.’

‘It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along.’

‘Freedom works,’ then US Secretary of State James Baker told a spontaneous crowd.

‘He would never be able to win his seat back from those dirty communist bastards without the right colour socks.’

‘Privacy is so important. We never had any privacy before.’

‘Not just important, it’s your right. It’s a right.’

‘Passports decided whether roads were open or closed.’

‘If I ever receive one for a trip, I will take you with me.’

‘Now you can travel. Inshallah your gold will multiply.’

‘It was harder for us to go to Athens than it was for Gagarin to go into orbit.’

‘How do spies smile? Like this,’ she replied, making a grimace with her mouth without showing her teeth.

‘Dafne always dried my tears. She still does.’

‘This is called a passport.’

‘From now on I will write down everything I see for the first time.’

‘Everyone wants to leave,’ I wrote in my diary, commenting on the events of March and August 1991. ‘Everyone except us.’

Knowing how you would get somewhere was more important than knowing why.

For some, leaving was a necessity that went under the official name of ‘transition’.

Opportunities would never come to you, unless you went looking for them.

The only thing that had changed was the colour of the police uniforms.

What value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter?

But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter?

Those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life.

Freedom of movement had never really mattered.

In normal circumstances, it would have been more desirable for freedom of movement to include the freedom to stay in one’s place.

This is capitalism. There’s competition for work. But, for now, I am free!

One should let bygones be bygones.

It was a matter of principle. The two were somehow combined.

People needed to know what belonged to them and to be able to do with it what they wanted.

Finding the truth about family property was as much a matter of rectifying historic injustice as of regulating property rights.

It’s like watching someone win a song contest with throat cancer.

Everyone seemed relaxed about this news of the redundancy.

She always spoke without notes. She delivered her speeches as if she had written them in her head many years ago.

The state was like a chess tournament director, who enforced the rules and checked the clock every now and then.

It would have been unfair to start a different game.

‘I think everyone should be free, not only women.’

‘In the land of freedom, … people are allowed to carry guns. That obviously makes it easier to defend oneself.’

‘Imagine if that applied to everything you did… What would you do if people always assumed you got where you are with a little help from your friends?’

‘These Western women, you know, they can’t multitask, they’re such losers.’

‘There would be no difference between you, who worked hard to get the best grades, and your friends, whose grades are bumped up only because they look like you.’

‘I always carried a knife.’

‘Her words came out quickly and without breaks, like small stones rolling down a steep hill.’

‘...she sought to control my fears, even dominate them, I struggled. I realized that she was an impossible model to follow.’

‘You should never wonder what the state could do for you, she thought, only what you could do to reduce your reliance on the state.’

‘It was either a failure of institutions or a lack of imagination that my mother lived all her life in a socialist state convinced that one can only ever fight against others, never alongside them.’

‘It’s freedom,’ my grandmother concluded. ‘It’s what too much freedom brings. There are good things, and bad things. It’s impossible to keep people always under control. Impossible to stop everyone from contracting this virus.'

‘Civil society’ was the new term recently added to the political vocabulary, more or less as a substitute for ‘Party’.

Without social control greater individual freedom would entail the freedom of individuals to harm themselves.

My teenage years were years of hyper-activism in civil society.

I suppose that’s why we need these NGOs. To protect us from all these new diseases, all these upcoming disasters.

It wasn’t clear if we had had it in the past and it had been captured by the Party, like Cronus swallowing his children at birth, or if we ought to create it from scratch.

Those were both spiritual and material [benefits of civil society].

Hope came in the form of a fortuitous meeting on the bus home from work with a group of young Americans.

Some of the people in the course could be quite aggressive in their critique of the Latter-Day Saints, he said. Murat invited the Marines to check out the old mosque.

‘It’s all part of civil society,’ was my mother’s contribution to the conversation, as if the mere mention of those two words could end all religious disputes.

‘Oh many, many countries. So many. In Africa, in South America. In Eastern Europe. Now in the Balkans. Everywhere. I’m a citizen of the world.’

‘I am free!’ he shouted. ‘Do you understand? I am free!’

There was a tacit agreement, after that dinner, that no matter how hard we tried to integrate Van de Berg, he would never be one of us.

Vincent’s capacity to draw parallels between the most disparate experiences... reminded me of my teacher Nora.

Oppression, she told us, has the same face everywhere.

Our heroes were ordinary people, and there were millions of others like them in the world.

We existed not as a product of our efforts but of the mercy of others.

Vincent had an uncanny ability to reduce the foreign to familiar categories.

...the familiar became foreign.

He had a vague sense of the destination. But catching up mattered more than explaining where one was heading.

At one point in his life, he had figured out that irony was more than a rhetorical device, it was a mode of survival.

The world doesn’t always revolve around you...

I don’t know how to go out there. Every day, there are more people.

They think it depends on me. They think I can do something.

They’re people. They have tears in their eyes, and sweat on their brows.

Soon, there will be jobs for everyone, it will be better.

I mean … yes, I make the decision, but the decision is … well, it’s not mine.

It’s not Ziku’s fault for being a cripple, he would say to me when I was little. It’s not my fault.

My father had been proud of his promotions at first... independence had its limits.

If I forget their names, I will forget about their lives.

If something could be done to raise yourself above the threshold, you forfeited your right to protest.

I was urged to feel grateful, to show my appreciation for the bliss of freedom.

You’ll get into trouble.

It was a bit like with food vouchers under socialism. Since everyone had a share of something, hunger couldn’t possibly exist.

Crying never helped anyone.

Do something. Read another book. Learn a new language. Find some activity.

You don’t realize how lucky you are. There’s a lot of misery out there.

The state, for her, could never be considered an owner of anything, only a criminal entity.

Life was less constrained but no less grim.

‘Mama here!’ he would shout every time he saw me.

‘We want Albania to be like the rest of Europe.’

Politics matters, she said, because you don’t just implement other people’s decisions, you get to make them.

One has to make sacrifices.

If you want to win, you need money. One always needs money.

Allah helps those who help themselves.

You have to save and invest. Save, and invest, so the money can grow.

Positive thinking won.

In a former communist country, there was no left or right, only ‘communist nostalgics’ and ‘liberal hopefuls’.

You need to invest it. Like the rest of Europe. What are you waiting for?

We were never taught positive thinking. I tell you, that’s our problem.

I think people should do what they think is right, not what the circumstances dictate.

Power has slipped away; they can’t hold on to it with strands of hair.

I thought I would just keep crying. It’s the waiting. The waiting strangles me.

I knew it was there, I just didn’t want to use it.

When I was there, I tried to shout.

It’s like a whole country committing suicide.

I want to go back to school.

There are so many blasts.

It’s so much fun to hang out with Babi.

I don’t think my voice is back.

‘Philosophy has only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’

‘Perhaps Marx meant that the philosophical theory that changes the world in the right direction is the right one.’

‘You can change the world by studying philosophy.’

‘History repeats itself. In 1990, we had nothing but hope. In 1997, we lost that too.’

‘I learned to live with the feeling of the precariousness of my existence.’

‘I accepted the meaninglessness of performing everyday actions when you don't know if, the next day, you will be able to do the same.’

‘The future looked bleak. And yet I had to act as if there was still a future.’

‘What’s the point of doing to your child something you yourself resented all your life?’

‘My father let me go. I left Albania... and waved goodbye on the shore.’

‘The most you will end up as is a secondary school teacher, explaining the history of the Party to apathetic sixteen-year-olds.’