“For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.”

Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds?

That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings

Once the dust clears you will be standing tall, a champion, a victor. NOTHING will be able to knock you down once you’ve taken the biggest hits this life has to offer, so come on life, BRING IT!

I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners.

Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

Mind: A beautiful servant, a dangerous master.

Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

You know the trouble with real life? There’s no danger music.

The truth is a double-edged sword; it is a dangerous thing.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

He is many things – dangerous and devious, cunning and deadly, a good friend and an implacable enemy – but he comes from an age when a man’s word was indeed precious.