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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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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Stories
Feel
Cheesy
Feels
Sounds
Trying
Couldn
Really
Duty
People
Sound
Speak
Tell

More quotes by 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.
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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 am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
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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]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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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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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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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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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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What good's a captive without her captor?
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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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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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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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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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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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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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