Quotes from Adam Johnson

Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die.

To think what the Stasi went through to spy on us. Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on themselves, morning, noon and night.

there were moments aboard the Junma where he felt a part, and that came with a satisfaction that wasn't located inside, but among.

Graffiti, citizens, is the name for the way capitalists deface their public buildings.

He closed his eyes and listened to her demand. There was something pure and beautiful about it. If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.

Citizens, gather 'round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates!

Old women look all innocent and goody-two-shoes, but then they level some all-knowing eyes on your ass.

Ga thought of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward.

that feeling of being alone and together at the same time.

To me," Jun Do said, "what everybody gets wrong about ghosts in the notion that they're dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.

Perhaps he'd tell the world about the look on the Captain's face as they motored south past the wide, empty beaches of Wonsan, which is where all the bureaucrats in Pyongyang are told they will go when they enter the paradise of retirement.

How to explain his country to her, he wondered. How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan - that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because there were guards everywhere - that was the purest freedom.

An ending to my story," he said. "My story's ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all.

They're for exercise, I think." "I've heard that," the old man said. "That Americans do pointless labor for fun.

When he woke in the hospital, he asked, Where's my arm, and the doctors said, Sorry, but we had to amputate, and the captain says, I know my arm is gone, where is it, but they won't tell him. He can feel it, he says, making a fist without him. In the tub, he can feel the hot water with his missing arm. But where is it—in the trash or burned? He knows it's out there, he can literally feel it, but he's got no powers.

CITIZENS, we bring good news! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors—wherever you hear this broadcast, turn up the volume! The first success we have to report is that our Grass into Meat Campaign is a complete

But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data—everything you say, you've said before." For

Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who'd quietly started weeping for reasons she didn't understand?

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. No one ever stared at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours...

When in doubt, always look to your leaders for proper behavior.

There was no such thing as abandonment, there were only people in impossible positions, people who had a best hope, or maybe only a sole hope. When the graver danger awaited, it wasn't abandoning, it was saving. He'd been saved, he now saw. A beauty, his mother, a singer. Because of that, a terrible fate awaited—she hadn't left him behind, she'd saved him from what was ahead.

Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University.

we do not need sight to see what you have become.

Certainly there'd been posters around for Sun Moon's movies, but they must not have seemed to apply to him. Now