Top 40 Adam Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

3. “The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.”

— Adam Johnson

4. “All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

6. “The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.”

— Adam Johnson

7. “Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

9. “I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.”

— Adam Johnson

10. “I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

12. “The truth is, though, that you don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost.”

— Adam Johnson

13. “But I’m a hero. I’ve got rights.” “Privileges,” the old man said. “You get some privileges.”

— Adam Johnson

14. “To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero.”

— Adam Johnson

15. “I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.”

— Adam Johnson

16. “Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die.”

— Adam Johnson

17. “To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts in the notion that they’re dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”

— Adam Johnson

18. “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.”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

20. “Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?”

— Adam Johnson

21. “I find a tattered copy of 1984. I open the book and read a little. Of course it is fiction, but the author gets a few things right – the control, the scrutiny, the feeling that nothing can be spontaneous, that the slightest move carries consequences for your future. It evokes a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long time, a sense that, even though you have a great job and house, there is no safe place to turn. The.”

— Adam Johnson

22. “What good’s a captive without her captor?”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

24. “He had been the person who took. He’d been the one who was taken. And he’d been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.”

— Adam Johnson

25. “For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings – all the human actions we think of as essential to a character – had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.”

— Adam Johnson

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

— Adam Johnson

27. “And then he closed his eyes and imagined Sun Moon, the one that was always within him... she was a calm presence, open-armed, ready to save him at all times. She wasn’t leaving him, she wasn’t going anywhere. And here the sharp pain in his chest subsided, and Commander Ga understood that the Sun Moon inside him was the pain reserve that would allow him to survive the loss of the Sun Moon before him.”

— Adam Johnson

28. “Sun Moon offered her Juche to him, and he gave her all he had of Songun policy.”

— Adam Johnson

29. “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.”

— Adam Johnson

30. “There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family.”

— Adam Johnson

31. “Ga thought of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward.”

— Adam Johnson

32. “If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.”

— Adam Johnson

33. “Graffiti, citizens, is the name for the way capitalists deface their public buildings.”

— Adam Johnson

34. “Christian talk, when said in a non-Christian way, scares these Southerners to death.”

— Adam Johnson

35. “You know what you are?” she said. “You’re a survivor who has nothing to live for.”

— Adam Johnson

36. “Even they couldn’t dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on.”

— Adam Johnson

37. “Citizens, gather ’round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates!”

— Adam Johnson

38. “Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover. “I could read some with you,” she said. “Do you know of Christ?” Jun Do nodded. “I’ve been briefed on him.”

— Adam Johnson

39. “Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws.”

— Adam Johnson

40. “He closed his eyes and listened to her demand. There was something pure and beautiful about it. If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.”

— Adam Johnson

41. “Endure what one must during the day. But please, can I not have some peace when darkness falls?”

— Adam Johnson

42. “Old women look all innocent and goody-two-shoes, but then they level some all-knowing eyes on your ass.”

— Adam Johnson