Quote

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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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Human
Upon
Essentials
Punished
Humans
Desire
Actions
Whispering
Self
Action
Entire
Lest
Think
Feelings
Growth
Spontaneity
Thinking
True
Personal
Revealing
Change
Dangerous
Hidden
Character
State
Longing
Populace
States
Acting
Essential
Censored

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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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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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What good's a captive without her captor?
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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
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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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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 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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