“The pigeon hiccups in the jungle; the fruit remains.”

Don't sweat the small things — a passing disturbance does not change what truly endures.

“To resist is to win — and not, to annihilate is to win.”

Gusmão's Falintil guerrilla motto: enduring under occupation, not destroying the enemy, was the resistance's true measure of victory.

“This is prison life. Only the body is imprisoned. The mind, the spirit are still free.”

Written from his Cipinang prison cell in Jakarta, reflecting Gusmão's belief that captivity could confine the body but never the will.

“As long as there is still one guerrilla fighter, the weapon of liberation will continue to spew forth the fire of freedom.”

A vow that the independence struggle would continue as long as even a single fighter remained, recorded on a tape smuggled out of prison.

“He is not the myth which some people have helped construct, nor even less the legendary figure on the lips of others. He is a man confronting many, many difficulties.”

Gusmão's own answer, in the third person, to the question "Who is Xanana?" — rejecting the legend built around him for an honest self-portrait.

“Grandfather crocodile — the legend says, and who am I to disbelieve, that he is Timor!”

The closing line of Gusmão's poem retelling Timor-Leste's founding myth, in which a crocodile transforms its body into the island itself.