Adam Johnson Quotes

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

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

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

Since I sleep fully clothed, I'm able to answer right away. By sleeping with your clothes on, you don't need to climb under the sheets. You don't need to disturb a perfectly made bed or even fold the bed back into the couch.

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

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.

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.

The only way to shake your ghosts was to find them ...

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.

You know what you are?" she said. "You're a survivor who has nothing to live for.

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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him...she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn't leaving him, she wasn't going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him.

Son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the Civil Rights Movement -

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.

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!

If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.

Eyes - There is a greater love, one that from the lowest places calls us high. Yes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Do you feel for the man hungry enough to steal?" Commander Ga asked as they drove by. "Or for the men who must hunt him down?"
"Isn't it the bird who suffers?" Sun Moon asked.

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.

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.

He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you'd once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself
Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs
you let go of all the others, each person you'd once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

How to explain his country to her, he wondered. How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan - that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because there were guards everywhere - that was the purest freedom.

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

All this information," I say. "Yet the world is more mysterious than ever.

Sometimes the boys from Propaganda will nose around for a feel-good story to play to the citizens over the loudspeakers, but we're story takers, not storytellers.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Do you think the Dear Leader's line should be read 'Love knows no replacement,' as if it's unthinkable to search for a substitute for love, or 'Love knows no replacement,' suggesting that love is sentient and is itself at a loss to comprehend its absence?

In this way, you'll live forever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aren't our lives a collision of the comic and the uncertain and the terrifying and the mundane?

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

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

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.

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.

Stories are factual ... If a man and his story are in conflict it is the man who must change ... In America it is the man who matters not the story.

The Respect for Elders Retirement Home on Moranbong Street.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I'm a Cancer, you know," I tell her. "So it's hard for me to talk. And I have all these weird dreams, not the ones with the Sony Girls - ha-ha - but mostly where I mow the lawn. Sometimes I just wash the car, like Gupta! But there's this voice in my head, and Lt. Kim thinks that once we get it to go away, I'll stop worrying that the good things in life are destined to fail, like you and me. But I'm up in this satellite dish, and I'm thinking: what if this is the voice that still believes things can be okay, that believes in good and warns me from bad? It wants to protect me, just like the United Nations.

literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth,

I'd always felt safe behind locked doors, but locks, I discovered, only locked you in. I

be the only one left. I'll bet I'm the

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

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.

To face the waves. They got battered while Officer So pull-started the motor. When the four of them were in and headed toward open water,

Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything