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 JOHNSON. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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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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All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
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That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?
ADAM JOHNSON -
Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.
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Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.
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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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But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.
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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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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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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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The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.
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For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.
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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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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.
ADAM JOHNSON