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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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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Lessons
Taught
Enemy
Learn
Need
Needs
Life

More quotes by Adam Johnson

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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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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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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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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.
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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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[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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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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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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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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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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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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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.
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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 people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.
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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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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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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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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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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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