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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

Adam Johnson

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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Loyalty
Nobody
Taught
Every

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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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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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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
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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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In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range
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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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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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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.
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What good's a captive without her captor?
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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.
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