Adam Johnson

“You can't leave me. I'm your captive," she said. "What good's a captive without her captor?”

“She's read every word I've written," he said. "That's the truest way to know someone's heart.”

“Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”

“I'm a Cancer, you know," I tell her. "So it's hard for me to talk. And I have all these weird dreams, not the ones with the Sony Girls - ha-ha - but mostly where I mow the lawn. Sometimes I just wash the car, like Gupta! But there's this voice in my head, and Lt. Kim thinks that once we get it to go away, I'll stop worrying that the good things in life are destined to fail, like you and me. But I'm up in this satellite dish, and I'm thinking: what if this is the voice that still believes things can be okay, that believes in good and warns me from bad? It wants to protect me, just like the United Nations.”

“She was a believer, you know," the Captain said. "My wife. She thought socialism was the only thing that would make us strong again. There would be a difficult period, she always said, some sacrifices. And then things would be better. I didn't think I would miss that, you know. I didn't realize how much I needed someone to keep telling me why.”

“. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .”

“. . . the only way to shake your ghosts was to find them . . .”

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

“Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything”

“The key to fighting in the dark is no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.”

“Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

“Where we are from, he said, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change....But in America, people's stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters.”

“The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.”

“Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.”

“The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.”

“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.”

“Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.”

“Inside, I’m assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment’s hardwired loudspeaker. There’s one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang”

“Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.”

“Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.”

“When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”

“[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”

“A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.”

“The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.”

“Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.”

“Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on.”