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.
ADAM JOHNSONBut people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.
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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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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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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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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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For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.
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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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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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What’s less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I’ve changed the cat little because I didn’t know what my characters were going to say next.
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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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What good’s a captive without her captor?
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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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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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That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?
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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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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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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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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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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.
ADAM JOHNSON