Best 39 quotes of Adam Johnson on MyQuotes

Adam Johnson

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    Adam Johnson

    A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

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    Adam Johnson

    "A name isn't a person." Ga said. "Don't ever remember someone by their name. 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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

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

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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.

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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. 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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    Adam Johnson

    In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

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    Adam Johnson

    [I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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. 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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    Adam Johnson

    Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything

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    Adam Johnson

    . . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

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    Adam Johnson

    Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.

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    Adam Johnson

    The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    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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    Adam Johnson

    Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them.

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    Adam Johnson

    In this way, you’ll live forever.

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    Adam Johnson

    It’s okay if you can’t make sense of that. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t grasp it, either. The most vital things we hide even from ourselves.

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    Adam Johnson

    Nonc’s pretty okay with the man’s death, but the notion that he’ll never get dressed again, that he’s to die in a gown, seems strange and impossible.

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    Adam Johnson

    Now, an important word from our Minister of Defense: Certainly the loudspeaker in each and every apartment in North Korea provides news, announcements, and cultural programming, but it must be reminded that it was by Great Leader Kim Il Sung's decree in 1973 that an anti-raid warning system be installed across this nation, and a properly functioning early-warning network is of supreme importance. The Inuit people are a tribe of isolate savages that live near the North Pole. Their boots are called mukluk. Ask your neighbor later today, what is a mukluk? If he does not know, perhaps there is a malfunction with his loudspeaker, or perhaps it has for some reason become accidentally disconnected. By reporting this, you could be saving his life the next time the Americans sneak-attack our great nation.

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    Adam Johnson

    Our rival interrogation team is the Pubyok, named after the "floating wall" defenders that saved Pyongyang from invaders in 1136. There are only a dozen or so left, old men with silver crewcuts who walk in a row like a wall and truly believe they can float, stealthy as ghosts, from one citizen to the next, interrogating them as the wind interrogates the leaves.

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    Adam Johnson

    The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It's not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok's car batteries...Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil's tip bursts with expression - squiggles, figures, words - filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil's footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil's next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it's laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white.

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    Adam Johnson

    This feeling of being in proximity to something that’s lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now.

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    Adam Johnson

    This was the face that Ga had shown the world, that of a boy who had swallowed the things that had happened to him, but who wouldn’t understand what they meant for a long, long time.

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    Adam Johnson

    To think what the Stasi went through to spy on us. Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on themselves, morning, noon and night.

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    Adam Johnson

    Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

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    Adam Johnson

    When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes