“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

After all, the true seeing is within.

A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they’re married.

It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.

The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise.

After I am dead, I would rather have men ask why Cato has no monument than why he had one.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

Do you know how many athletes go broke three years after they stop playing? I want to help them hold on to their money. I mean, I know about budgets.