All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
ADAM JOHNSONThe next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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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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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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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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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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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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But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.
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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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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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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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[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.
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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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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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What good’s a captive without her captor?
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Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.
ADAM JOHNSON