The Pyongyang Times Quotes

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy - they wouldn't tell me the breed - but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I guess it could be worse. My name could be Tlaquepaque, or Irkutsk, or Pyongyang. Or, you know, Pittsburgh. Sometimes I flip through the atlas just to remind myself of all the names that would be worse than mine. ~ Tamara Summers

At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world's largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered. ~ Barbara Demick

We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the "Jerusalem of the East." Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion.

Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il's birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a "general who will rule the world. ~ Barbara Demick

Yet skirts are getting shorter, and more women can be seen in Pyongyang now with high heels. The change must be shocking to people in the more conservative countryside, where high heels continue to be associated with prostitution. ~ Felix Abt

...travel permits to Pyongyang were notoriously hard to get. In order to keep Pyongyang as a showcase city, the North Korean government restricted visitors. ~ Barbara Demick

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

The accession to power in Pyongyang of Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il and grandson of Kim Il Sung, is a unique achievement in world politics. ~ Elliott Abrams

The green spaces in Pyongyang were immense and many in number, but not as immense as the monuments. ~ David Baldacci

Because Pyongyang is the only North Korean city frequented by foreigners, the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound. ~ Barbara Demick

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

The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang. ~ Peter Thiel

We left in the same kind of truck that had brought us to the camp ten years earlier. When it started up, I was taken back to our departure from Pyongyang, and to my mother's tear-lined face as it receded into the distance. The vision struck me with new and unexpected force - for I had all but forgotten my mother. ~ Kang Chol-Hwan

Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side. ~ Barbara Demick

For years, I believed that God had been in motion on rare occasions and during biblical times, but I didn't understand that God never stops working on my behalf. ~ Jeff Leake

Often pointed out that bright mornings brought on wet afternoons, and that you can't expect good times to last. ~ C.S. Lewis

The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up. ~ Jenni Rivera

The humans aren't stupid, no matter what the purebloods say; they're just blind, and sometimes, that's worse. They put their fear in stories and songs, where they won't forget it. "Up the airy mountains and down the rushy glen, I dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men." We've given them plenty of reasons to fear us. Even if they've almost forgotten - even if they only remember that we were beautiful and not why they were afraid - the fear was there before anything else. There were reasons for the burning times; there's a reason the fairy tales survive. And there's a reason the human world doesn't want to see the old days come again. ~ Seanan McGuire

In spite of everything she did that she shouldn't have done, and everything she didn't do that she should have, something that felt like love was in her and she would take it out at times like this and show it to us and make us hunger for more. All of us, each in our own way. ~ Wendy Walker

I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what's happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might. ~ Anne Rice

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. ~ Erma Bombeck

Sometimes our need clouds our ability to develop perspective. Being needy is kind of like losing your keys. You become desperate and search everywhere. You search in places you know damn well what you are looking for could never be. The more frantic you become in trying to find them the less rational you are in your search. The less rational you become the more likely you'll be searching in a way that actually makes finding what you want more difficult. You go back again and again to where you want them to be, knowing that there is no way in hell that they are there. There is a lot of wasted effort. You lose perspective of your real goal, let's say it's go to the grocery store, and instead of getting what you need -nourishment, you frantically chase your tail growing more and more confused and angry and desperate. You are mad at your keys, you are mad at your coat pockets for not doing their job. You are irrational. You could just grab the spare set, run to the grocery store and get what you need, have a sandwich, calm down and search at your leisure. But you don't.

Where ARE your keys?! Your desperation is skewing your judgement. But you need to face it, YOUR keys are not in HIS pocket. You know your keys are not there. You have checked several times. They are not there. He is not responsible for your keys. You are. He doesn't want to be responsible for your keys. Here's the secret: YOU don't want to be responsible for your keys. If you did you would be searching ~ Tim Janes

I was too scared to kill you. I had a gun. I bought it just to shoot you. But the closest I ever came to killing anyone with it was myself. I put it in my mouth one night to see how it tasted. ... I was scared to do that, too. Not because I'm afraid I'll go to hell for committing suicide. It's because I'm afraid I won't go to hell ... that there isn't a hell to go to. No heaven either. Just nothing. Mostly I think there emus be nothing after we die. Sometimes that seems like it would be a relief. Other times it's the most awful thing I can imagine. ~ Joe Hill

To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say "Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?" And they hesitate. And then I say, "What's the matter? Why are you hesitating?" And so often people say, "I don't feel like I'm good enough yet. I don't think I'm ready to say I'm a Christian now." And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, "Well, I don't think I' good enough," but it's a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, "I'm not good enough; Oh, I'm not good enough," you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you're better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? It doesn't matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art. ~ Robin Leach

- How does it feel to have a daughter?
- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand. ~ Clarice Lispector

Sometimes, when things fall apart, it's because you spent so much time being scared that it was too perfect and it slips through your fingers. When you try to hold love too tightly, it leaves you without warning. You have to revel in the ease of it, because even when the hard times come you can overtake them, and fear is just a crutch and the sibling of doubt. ~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

At times ... one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people. ~ Gail Godwin

Fentanyl is incredibly potent, approximately 80-100 times stronger than morphine and much more than heroin. Also known by the brand names Sublimaze, Duragesic, Actiq and others, fentanyl is commonly used to treat breakthrough pain in conjunction with surgical procedures. ~ Taite Adams

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden. ~ Ellen Potter

If a church offers no truth that is not available in the general culture - in, for instance, the editorials of the New York Times or, for that matter, of National Review - there is not much reason to pay it attention. ~ Richard John Neuhaus

There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend. ~ Rick Yancey

Love was a hundred times worse than all the stupid songs could ever try to explain. And when he loved you back, it was too much. Like all of those feelings could never fit. You'd have to spend your life trying to figure out how, but it wouldn't matter as long as he kept looking at you like that. ~ K.A. Mitchell

What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky! ~ Eli Of Kittim

In violent times folk like to kneel to violent men. In peaceful times they remember they're happier standing. ~ Joe Abercrombie

Suppose someone tells you that he just flipped a coin 10 times and all 10 were heads? What is the probability that the next flip will be heads too? If you think 50%, then you are discounting the very high probability that the game is rigged. And this makes you a sucker. ~ Dmitry Orlov

Nature is at all times unequivocal; its secrets, so difficult to decode, lay open to the eye. It is otherwise with the fullness of being of the soul. It never exhausts itself as having come into existence; rather, it passes through this level of determination and exhaustion only to return again to a process of becoming, to a living actuality. From an unfathomable primordial source, interior being [innern], the soul's difficult-to-comprehend forms climb into the light of consciousness where they dissolve again like all genuine creations of the night. The soul is at all times ambiguous; before every attempt to unravel its secrets, it retreats back to the depths. ~ Helmuth Plessner

When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance, never to accept limitations that stood in my way. As an adult, watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn't simply be wished away. When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value. Helping my father through the struggle to define that moment was simultaneously among the most painful and most privileged experiences of my life. Part of the way my father handled the limits he faced was by looking at them without illusion. Though his circumstances sometimes got him down, he never pretended they were better than they were. He always understood that life is short and one's place in the world is small. But he also saw himself as a link in a chain of history. ~ Atul Gawande

The United States is a concept that works very well, even in bad times. But that's no reason to think its structure can be superimposed with success on any other part of the world, particularly when times are terrible. ~ Paul Johnson