43 Quotes by Yeonmi Park

In the free world, children dream about what they want to be when they grow up and how they can use their talents. When I was four and five years old, my only adult ambition was to buy as much bread as I liked and eat all of it.

In North Korea, even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?

More important, while these students were in school, I was learning from life. And so I have something to offer that they do not.

We all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.

There were so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you don’t care anymore. And that is what hell is like.

I inhaled books like other people breathe oxygen. I didn’t just read for knowledge or pleasure, I read to live.

I was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t free, and I wasn’t safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone.

There was no ‘I’ in North Korea – only ’we.

In second grade we were taught simple math, but not the way it is taught in other countries. In North Korea, even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?