91 Quotes by Barbara Demick

...travel permits to Pyongyang were notoriously hard to get. In order to keep Pyongyang as a showcase city, the North Korean government restricted visitors.

He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he’d get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors.

Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.

By the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song later surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed.

There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.

The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent.

When you work, you don’t have time to do anything stupid. When you work ten hours a day, you forget everything. We have to forget. There is no looking back, only forward.” In.

One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.

But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.