Adam Johnson Quotes & Sayings

I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader? — Adam Johnson

The inmates keep their distance and do what inmates always seem to do: affirm and reassure, make the future seem doable. — Adam Johnson

Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover. "I could read some with you," she said. "Do you know of Christ?" Jun Do nodded. "I've been briefed on him. — Adam Johnson

literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth, — 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. — Adam Johnson

Do you know what happens to men who fall in love with me?" she asked.

Ga took a moment to think about it.

"They get locked in your tunnel and fed nothing but broth for two weeks?"

Playfully, she said, "No."

"Hmm," Ga said. "Your neighbor tries to give them botulism and then they get punched in the nose by the Dear Leader's driver?"

"No."

"Okay, I give up. What happens to men who fall for you?"

She shimmied her body so that her hips were under his.

"They fall forever," she said. — Adam Johnson

we do not need sight to see what you have become. — Adam Johnson

There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family. — Adam Johnson

that feeling of being alone and together at the same time. — Adam Johnson

They opened the bilge, slopping out all the plane's sewage in a midnight — Adam Johnson

The things that make us human: freedom, art, choice, identity, expression, love. And — 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! — Adam Johnson

A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out." He — Adam Johnson

You can't leave me. I'm your captive," she said. "What good's a captive without her captor? — Adam Johnson

Acts of heroism are easy - becoming a hero is a bitch. — Adam Johnson

An ending to my story," he said. "My story's ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all. — Adam Johnson

If there are ghosts on this earth, they are formed by the things you cannot utter, and they'll outlive the black in your teeth, burn hotter than any hole in your stomach. Untold stories take on lives of their own. They silently eat dinner with you. Still as shoe trees, they stand over you, watching you sleep. They'll make you pace all-night — Adam Johnson

They're about a woman whose beauty is like a rare flower. There is a man who has a great love for her, a love he's been saving up for his entire life, and it doesn't matter that he must make a great journey to her, and it doesn't matter if their time together is brief, that afterward he might lose her, for she is the flower of his heart and nothing will keep him from her. — Adam Johnson

It's called a gui-tar. It's used to perform American rural music. It's said to be especially popular in Texas, " he told her. "It's also the instrument of choice for playing 'the blues,' which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making. — Adam Johnson

She's read every word I've written," he said. "That's the truest way to know someone's heart. — Adam Johnson

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary? — Adam Johnson

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

Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die. — Adam Johnson

And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresistible. How was it that we didn't walk around with every person who mattered tattooed on us forever? And then Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he'd never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat. — Adam Johnson

I do not need to recall the past," I say. "I am certain of what it was. — Adam Johnson

With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms - the war novel - and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration - everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant - and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less. — Adam Johnson

I know this," the Second Mate said. "A sexy girl thinks she can do anything. — Adam Johnson

That's what they say," Jun Do said. "But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done." The — Adam Johnson

There was no such thing as abandonment, there were only people in impossible positions, people who had a best hope, or maybe only a sole hope. When the graver danger awaited, it wasn't abandoning, it was saving. He'd been saved, he now saw. A beauty, his mother, a singer. Because of that, a terrible fate awaited - she hadn't left him behind, she'd saved him from what was ahead. — Adam Johnson

Gruesome that nobody wants to go near it. Then you slip away." "But the Canning Master's family, — Adam Johnson

Where we are from, he said, stories 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 ... But in America, people's stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters. — Adam Johnson

It wasn't that I didn't know anyone's phone number - I didn't - it was that only at this moment did I realize I had no one to call. There wasn't a woman, a colleague, or even a relative that I had to contact. Didn't I have a single friend? — 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. — Adam Johnson

His mind and his flesh had separated, his brain had sat high and frightened above the mule of his body, a beast of burden that hopefully would make it alone over the treacherous mountain pass of Prison 33. But now as a woman ran a warm washcloth along the arch of his foot, the sensation was allowed to rise up, up into his brain , and it was okay to perceive again, to recognize forgotten parts of his body as they hailed him. His lungs were more than air bellows. His heart, he believed now, could do more than move blood. — Adam Johnson

You can barely make out the heavy wooden block of the contortion seat. I run my hands along it's contours, the wood grain smooth and polished from human flesh. — Adam Johnson

He'd spent his life with orphans, he understood their special plight, so he didn't hate them like most people did. He just wasn't one of them. — Adam Johnson

I find a tattered copy of 1984. I open the book and read a little. Of course it is fiction, but the author gets a few things right - the control, the scrutiny, the feeling that nothing can be spontaneous, that the slightest move carries consequences for your future. It evokes a feeling I haven't experienced in a long time, a sense that, even though you have a great job and house, there is no safe place to turn. The — Adam Johnson

What happened?" Buc asked him. "I told her the truth about something," Ga answered. "You've got to stop doing that," Buc said. "It's bad for people's health. — Adam Johnson

Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University. — Adam Johnson

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

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

for me. "I'm sorry that I let you — 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. — Adam Johnson

Mayoimashita. Can you help me find my cat? - Watashi — 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. — Adam Johnson

Trauma narratives are hallmarked by fragmentation, broken chronology, changing perspectives, shifts in tone, and absented moments. I — Adam Johnson

He had been the person who took. He'd been the one who was taken. And he'd been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once. — Adam Johnson

How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live - you could see it go out of him - when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away. — Adam Johnson

But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data - everything you say, you've said before." For — Adam Johnson

At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding. — 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. — Adam Johnson

The truth is, though, that you don't need to die to know what it's like to be a ghost. — Adam Johnson

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

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality. — Adam Johnson

only a book could be written to help the average citizen penetrate and understand a dream's mysteries. Officially, the government took no position on what occurred while its citizens were asleep, but isn't something of the dreamer to be found in his dream? And — Adam Johnson

The key to fighting in the dark was no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you. From — Adam Johnson

He couldn't believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren't an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith - all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he'd helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception. — Adam Johnson

Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on. — Adam Johnson

Life's full of events - they occur and you adjust, you roll and move on. But at some point you realize some events are actually developments. You realize there's a big plan out there you know nothing about, and a development is a first step in that new direction. Sometimes things feel like big-time developmens but in time you adjust, you find a new way and realize they didn't throw you off course, they didn't change you. They were just events.
The tricky part is telling the difference between the two. — 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. — Adam Johnson

Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws. — 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. — Adam Johnson

Inside, I'm assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment's hardwired loudspeaker. There's one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang — Adam Johnson

The wound of not knowing," Ga said to her. "That's the one that never heals." The — 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. — Adam Johnson

It's true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren't going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different. — Adam Johnson

She was a believer, you know," the Captain said. "My wife. She thought socialism was the only thing that would make us strong again. There would be a difficult period, she always said, some sacrifices. And then things would be better. I didn't think I would miss that, you know. I didn't realize how much I needed someone to keep telling me why. — Adam Johnson

Christian talk, when said in a non-Christian way, scares these Southerners to death. — Adam Johnson

CITIZENS, we bring good news! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors - wherever you hear this broadcast, turn up the volume! The first success we have to report is that our Grass into Meat Campaign is a complete — Adam Johnson

Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on — 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 — Adam Johnson

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth. — Adam Johnson

Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack - if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous. — Adam Johnson

Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything — Adam Johnson

If you keep your eyes closed, your mind will show you all kinds of crazy movies ... But with your eyes open, all you had to face was the nothingness of what you were really doing. — 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. — Adam Johnson

Son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the Civil Rights Movement - — 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. — Adam Johnson

They'd come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it - he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who'd gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing. — Adam Johnson

The longer the night, the shorter the morning — Adam Johnson

The only way to shake your ghosts was to find them ... — 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! — Adam Johnson

Are there labor camps here?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"Mandatory marriages, forced-criticism sessions, loudspeaker?"
She shook her head.
"Then I'm not sure I could ever feel free here," he said. — Adam Johnson

Ga thought of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward. — Adam Johnson

In a gesture of socialist support, the Dear Leader placed his hand upon her. — 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. — Adam Johnson

Developments can happen right in front of you like that, you don't even see them. — Adam Johnson

Let this story be an inspiration when dealing with the weak-minded who share your communal housing blocks and the selfish who use all the soap in your group bathing wells. Know that change is achievable and that happy endings do come, for this story promises to have the happiest ending you will ever hear — Adam Johnson

Nonc is on his side, looking at a boy whose breathing is untroubled for all he's been through, though there's a lack of shine in his eyes, as if the little light in him might someday go out. His breath is clean and perfect, though, sweet-smelling. — 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. — Adam Johnson

I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you'll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that's ever been. You walk and walk and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you're worth. The — Adam Johnson

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . . — Adam Johnson

Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who'd quietly started weeping for reasons she didn't understand? — Adam Johnson

He noted a depth and sadness in Sun Moon's eyes, the faint lines around them bespeaking a resoluteness in the face of loss, and it took everything in him to suppress the memory of Rumina. And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresisitible. How was it that we didn't walk around with every person who mattered tattoed on us forever? — Adam Johnson

He held his grip on her arm. "What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?" "Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten — Adam Johnson

They're for exercise, I think." "I've heard that," the old man said. "That Americans do pointless labor for fun. — Adam Johnson

There are those who are born, those who are made, and then there are ones like this guy, the kind who choose. — Adam Johnson

She lives in the apartment complex next door and has two daughters, a music blog and a committed relationship with alcohol. — Adam Johnson

Sun Moon offered her Juche to him, and he gave her all he had of Songun policy. — Adam Johnson