"Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much."
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Quote collection
Adam Johnson quotes (page 1 of 2)
30 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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?"
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"The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw."
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". . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . ."
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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. 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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"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. 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 am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self."
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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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"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. 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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"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! 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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"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."
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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. Still, I'd thought I'd had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong."
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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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"A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar."
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"For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - 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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"I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea."
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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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"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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"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 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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