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.

For me the very important thing was never to forget that they had no right to have me there, that my duty was to escape and that I needed to get back to my family and to my children no matter what. And that I could not accept to just see them as an authority, that I had to always keep in mind that I had to rebel and to keep my distance and to protect my soul because the core of the problem is dignity.

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

In this condition of the most devastating humiliation, I still possessed the most precious of liberties, that no-one could take away from me: that of deciding who I wanted to be.

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.

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

I think that for example as a prisoner of course I was pressured to become very submissive and in a way the syndrome of Stockholm is when you shift position and then you become like you're supposed to act, which is accepting the authority of those who have abducted you.