37 Quotes by Hyeonseo Lee

I was already hiding beneath so many lies that I hardly knew who I was any more. I was becoming a non-person.

It was the dilemma all three of us had. Every choice we made cut us off permanently from someone we loved.

She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done.

Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

History lessons were superficial. The past was not set in stone, and was occasionally rewritten.

North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.

She liked to dress well because she thought this made up for plain and ordinary looks. In fact she was prettier than she knew.

Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear.

One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are.