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

Adam Johnson

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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Future
Use
Past
Never
Present
Imagination

More quotes by Adam Johnson

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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
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All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
Adam Johnson
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I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
Adam Johnson
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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
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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
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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
Adam Johnson
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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
Adam Johnson
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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.
Adam Johnson
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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
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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.
Adam Johnson
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Adam Johnson
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The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.
Adam Johnson
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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
Adam Johnson
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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
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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
Adam Johnson
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[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
Adam Johnson
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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.
Adam Johnson