"Often during my days of house arrest, it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world," she said to a silent chamber, which was lined with rainbows of freshly cut zinnias and towers of orchids and gladiolas. "There was the house, which was my world. There was the world of others who also were not free but who were together in prison as a community. And there was the world of the free. Each one was a different planet pursuing its own separate course in an indifferent universe.
"What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once again into the world of other human beings, outside the isolated area in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to me. . . . And what was more important, the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma. We were not going to be forgotten," she said during her 40-minute oration.
Suu Kyi, who since winning freedom in 2010 has led her National League for Democracy party into opposition in Myanmar's parliament, offered cautious support for the first tentative steps toward democratic reform in her country. But she said progress would depend both on maintaining foreign pressure on the army-backed government and on carefully managing the ethnic tensions threatening to tear apart the country.
"If I advocate cautious optimism, it is not because I do not have faith in the future, but because I do not want to encourage blind faith. Without faith in the future, without the conviction that democratic values and fundamental human rights are not only necessary but possible for our society, our movement could not have been sustained throughout the destroying years," she said, referring to the two decades since Myanmar's military leaders rejected her party's overwhelming triumph in 1990 elections, one year after Suu Kyi's own imprisonment.
Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, introduced Suu Kyi as a leader of "awe-inspiring tenacity, sacrifice, and firmness of principle."
"In your isolation, you have become a moral leader for the whole world," he said from the lectern, turning to the seated Suu Kyi.
"Your voice became increasingly clear the more the military regime tried to isolate you. Your cause mobilized your people and prevailed over a massive military junta. Whenever your name is mentioned or when you speak, your words bring new energy and hope to the entire world," Jagland said to applause.
Suu Kyi, in a traditional Burmese gown of purple, lilac, and ivory, offered only a stoic Mona Lisa smile at the end of her speech, greeted with a two-minute ovation. As during her public events last week in Switzerland and Norway, she spoke with a voice of unerring crisp diction but a physical presence bordering on exhaustion.
