Child Soldier Slavery Quotes

Our guns were still strapped onto our backs, because a gun meant life. Without it there was no life in the LRA. After crossing the water and walking for a long time, there was a whisper in my heart, telling me that if we kept the guns we would get killed.

I was learning to listen to this gentle voice that spoke to my heart. This time what was said was hard to accept. I didn't know how I would convince my friends to throw away what seemed to be their last hope. The voice would not leave me alone. It continued to whisper in my ears to drop the guns. ~ Grace Akallo

The landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal ... once peace is declared the landmine does not recognize that peace. The landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. ~ Jody Williams

As you might expect, the geographical location of the capital of Fairyland is fickle and has a rather short temper. I'm afraid the whole thing moves around according to the needs of narrative.'

September put her persimmon down in the long grass. 'What in the world does that mean?'

'I ... I SUSPECT it means that if we ACT like the kind of folk who would find a Fairy city whilst on various adventures involving tricksters, magical shoes, and hooliganism, it will come to us.'

September blinked. 'Is that how things are done here?'

'Isn't that how they're done in your world?'

September thought for a long moment. She thought of how children who acted politely were often treated as good and trustworthy, even if they pulled your hair and made fun of your name when grownups weren't around. She thought of how her father acted like a soldier, strict and plain and organized -- and how the army came for him. She thought of how her mother acted strong and happy even when she was sad, and so no one offered to help her, to make casseroles or watch September after school or come over for gin rummy and tea. And she thought of how she had acted just like a child in a story about Fairyland, discontent and complaining, and how the Green Wind had come for her, too.

'I suppose that is how things are done in my world. It's hard to see it, though, on the other side. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

You're good at this," said Ronan.
"What?"
He leaned to touch the baby's head. "Being a mother."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
Ronan looked awkward. Then he said glibly, "Nothing, if you don't like it." He glanced at Benix, Faris, and the others, but they were discussing thumbscrews and nooses. "It didn't mean anything. I take it back."
Kestrel set the baby on the grass next to Faris. "You cannot take it back."
"Just this once," he said, echoing her earlier words during the game.
She stood and walked away.
He followed. "Come, Kestrel. I spoke only the truth."
They had entered the shade of thickly grown laran trees, whose leaves were a bloody color. They would soon fall.
"It's not that I wouldn't want to have a child someday," Kestrel told Ronan.
Visibly relieved, he said, "Good. The empire needs new life."
It did. She knew this. As the Valorian empire stretched across the continent, it faced the problem of keeping what it had won. The solutions were military prowess and boosting the Valorian population, so the emperor prohibited any activities that unnecessarily endangered Valorian lives--like dueling and the bull-jumping games that used to mark coming-of-age ceremonies. Marriage became mandatory by the age of twenty for anyone who was not a soldier.
"It's just--" Kestrel tried again: "Ronan, I feel trapped. Between what my father wants and--"
He held up his hands in flat-palmed defense. "I am not trying ~ Marie Rutkoski

If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong. ~ Howell Cobb

He wasn't that careful, Lucan. I think you've got him mixed up with someone else."


"He put a lot of effort into you. Not just as a soldier. But as a child. Why teach you that horse sport? Why teach you to play an instrument? Why give you a God? He took you to church? Every week?"


I swallow and nod as my face begins to feel hot.


"Men who want to kill their grandchildren don't do those things, Junco."


FLIGHT ~ Chapter One ~ J.A. Huss

Every morning is good news, every child that is born is good news, every just man is good news, every singer is good news, because every singer is one less soldier. ~ Facundo Cabral

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. ~ Pablo Picasso

Let's call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I'm the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier. ~ Dot Hutchison

You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying. ~ Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple's face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.
He turned the portrait over to look for a caption.
On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Artist Unknown. ~ Josephine Tey

we as authors have been writing about people we aren't for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are people too. Instead of asking yourself, "How do I write this female soldier?" ask yourself, "How do I write this soldier? Where is she from, how was she raised, does she have a sense of humour? Is she big and tall, is she short and petite? How does her size affect her ability to fight? What is her favourite weapon, her least favourite? Why? Is she more logical than emotional? The other way around? Was she an only child and spoiled, was she the eldest of six siblings and a surrogate mother? How does that upbringing affect how she interacts with her team? etc etc and so forth." Notice how the first question gets you some kind of broad, generalised answer, likely resulting in a stereotype, and how the second version asks lots and lots of smaller questions with the goal of creating someone well rounded.

One would hope, really, that we as authors ask such detailed questions of all our characters, regardless of gender.


So let me, at long last, actually answer the original question:

"How do I write a female character?"

Write her the way you would write any other character. Give her dimension, give her strength but please also don't forget to give her weaknesses (for a totally strong nothing can beat her kind of girl is not a person, she's again a ty ~ Adrienne Kress

Of little use, the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose;
Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place
And speak in public with some sort of grace? ~ Alexander Pope

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal. ~ Emmanuel Jal

Universal ratification of the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict will establish an international moral consensus that no child should take part in hostilities or be involuntarily recruited and that former child soldiers should be assisted by their governments after a life of violence and distress. ~ Ban Ki-moon

It's a Vietnamese soup that answers the question, 'What happens when a former child soldier pours hot rain water over fish nightmares.' It's delicious and I can't stop eating it, that's what happens. ~ Kyle Kinane

Des felt a familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. All soldiers felt the same thing going into battle, whether they admitted it or not: fear. Fear of failure, fear of dying, fear of watching their friends die, fear of being wounded and living out the rest of their days crippled or maimed. The fear was always there, and it would devour you if you let it.
Des knew how to turn that fear to his own advantage. Take what makes you weak and turn it into something that makes you strong. Transform the fear into anger and hate: hatred of the enemy; hatred of the Republic and the Jedi. The hate gave him strength, and the strength brought him victory.
For Des the transformation came easily once the fighting started. Thanks to his abusive father, he'd been turning fear into anger and hate ever since he was a child. Maybe that was why he was such a good soldier. Maybe that was why the others looked to him for leadership. ~ Drew Karpyshyn

Like an AWOL soldier saying goodbye to his ~ Lee Child

The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of Liberty
that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men. ~ George Washington

Blaming the woman for the loss of a child is like blaming the soldier for the loss of his life in battle. ~ Katherine Longshore

Ask a child "what do you want to be when you grow up", they would say "I want to become a doctor and save lives - I want to become a cop and protect the innocent - I want to become a soldier and defend my people." But ask the same question after they finish their education, and their answer would be "I want to get a highly paid job - I want to buy a large mansion - I want to be a millionaire". Here I ask you, who turned a hero into a selfish, insecure narcissist? It's our system of education. ~ Abhijit Naskar

There she stands before me, and old woman with an anxious, care-worn face. Her hands are clasped - weary, toil-worn hands with a soft, wrinkled skin, where the veins stand out bluish; hands become so for my sake. - I never thought of that before. There is a lot I did not think of before; I was too young. But now I understand how it is that to this withered, little woman I am something different from any other soldier in the world: I am her child. To her I have always remained so, even as a soldier. In the war she has seen only a pack of wild beasts threatening the life of her child. It has never occurred to her that this same threatened child has been just such another wild beast to the children of yet other mothers. My ~ Erich Maria Remarque

This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside me now. The Angkar has taught me to hate so deeply that I now know I have the power to destroy and kill. ~ Loung Ung

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. ~ Wendell Berry

To me soldiers had appeared to become younger as the war went on, and Rudy was no exception to this [ ... ]. And like so many of them now he looked, without his helmet, like a child dressed up as a soldier. ~ Michael Morpurgo

Ranulf stared blankly into the campfire, trying to ignore Lily.
"White horses always look dirty," Lily told the young smitten soldier sitting beside her. "That's why I refuse to ride them.Brown ones may be just as filthy,but at least I cannot see the dirt. Black ones less so,but I have found that in general dark horses suit me better."
"You just think you look better on them," Edythe protested before succumbing to several seconds of coughing.
Bronwyn studied her redheaded sister for a moment.Tyr put another blanket around Edythe's shoulders and eventually the coughs quieted. Turning her attention to Ranulf,Bronwyn promised him softly, "You'll have to ignore them."
Ranulf grimaced and sent a reproving look to his youngest sister-in-law. It,just like the others he had sent Lily throughout the day,changed nothing. "I just find it hard to reconcile the child I hear now with the woman who appeared after your death. With you gone,she had to grow up.Now that you are back..."
Bronwyn snuggled up against his side with a sigh. "I admit I encourage it.Life will force Lily to grow up soon enough and I am glad it was not my death that thrust it upon her. In the meantime,you ignore her prattle and I'll just be amused it," she advised before planting a gentle kiss on his arm.
Ranulf,with his free hand, raked his fingers through his short hair. How had he gotten into this predicament? But it took only one look at the huddled form next to him to remember exactly ~ Michele Sinclair

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life. ~ Carolyn See

A father who denies a child of his attention is no better than a fully-equipped medic who watches idly as a soldier bleeds to death. ~ Wes Fesler

I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories. ~ Ishmael Beah

Because deep down to the army a wounded soldier that can't fight anymore is garbage. So we depend on civilians, and civilians don't care either. ~ Lee Child

Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal. ~ Jody Williams

A lot of child soldiers lose their minds. ~ Emmanuel Jal

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know. ~ Ishmael Beah

so we were playing all this game then and thinking that to be a soldier was to be the best thing in the world because gun is looking so powerful and the men in movie are looking so powerful and strong when they are killing people,but I am knowing now that to be a soldier is only to be weak and not strong, and to have no food to eat and not to eat whatever you want, and also to have people making you do thing that you are not wanting to do and not to be doing whatever you are wanting which is what they are doing in movie. But I am only knowing this now because I am soldier now. ~ Uzodinma Iweala

Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark ... In the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower