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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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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Living
Experience
Made
People
Ghosts
Ghost
Range
Forever

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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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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.
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All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
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But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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What good's a captive without her captor?
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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.
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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.
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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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