43 Quotes by Yeonmi Park

Come to my grave someday, and tell me that the North and South are reunited.” It.

Along my journey I have seen the horrors that humans can inflict on one another, but I’ve also witnessed acts of tenderness and kindness and sacrifice in the worst imaginable circumstances. I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.

I know that it is possible to lose a part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom, and the power of love, it can grow again.

I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. Before the public distribution system collapsed, the government alone decided who would survive and who would starve. The markets took away the government’s control.

But there was human intimacy and connection, something that is hard to find in the modern world I inhabit today.

A second chance? I thought. A second chance is what criminals get. I knew I wasn’t a criminal; I did what I had to do to survive and save my family.

They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I believed in a benevolent power guiding the universe, a loving force that somehow nudged us in the direction of good instead of evil. I believed that Jesus was part of that force, along with the Buddha, and all the spiritual beings that we called on in our moments of despair and need.

Reading was teaching me what it meant to be alive, to be human.