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.

I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.

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

We're too passive. We're feeding on too much rubbish and I think we should strive to just shrug away that comfort zone and be able to get the most of each one of us, which means restructuring the way we deal with time and the priorities we have in life, so being what we want to be I think should be something that we should keep in mind.

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.

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 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.