There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you’ll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
ADAM JOHNSONSometimes 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!
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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All the human actions we think of as essential to a character – had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.
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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.
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For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.
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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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What good’s a captive without her captor?
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And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.
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[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds?
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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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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!
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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I’ve learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash through whatever is thrown at you next.
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Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.
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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!
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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.
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Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
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Conjure up all the strength you have and drive through whatever it is keeping you on your knees. Build up the strength and your knees may never buckle again!
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In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range
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Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.
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Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings
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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.
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The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.
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To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”
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But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.
ADAM JOHNSON