87 Quotes by Adam Johnson

Even they couldn’t dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on.

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.

Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws.

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.

What good’s a captive without her captor?

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.

Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover. “I could read some with you,” she said. “Do you know of Christ?” Jun Do nodded. “I’ve been briefed on him.

And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him... she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn’t leaving him, she wasn’t going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him.

If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.