Adam Johnson Quotes

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

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

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

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.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

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.

Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything

What good's a captive without her captor?

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

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

In this way, you’ll live forever.

To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero

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

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you

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.

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.

... that "take" was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.

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.

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.