Top 40 Barbara Demick Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.”

— Barbara Demick

2. “When you work, you don’t have time to do anything stupid. When you work ten hours a day, you forget everything. We have to forget. There is no looking back, only forward.” In.”

— Barbara Demick

3. “The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent.”

— Barbara Demick

4. “But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.”

— Barbara Demick

5. “For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history.”

— Barbara Demick

6. “Charity begins with a full stomach,” the North Koreans like to say; you can’t feed somebody else’s kids if your own are starving. When.”

— Barbara Demick

7. “We joked that unrequited, or in this case unconsummated, love affairs are the only ones that last forever.”

— Barbara Demick

8. “The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.”

— Barbara Demick

9. “One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.”

— Barbara Demick

10. “Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive. North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime.”

— Barbara Demick

11. “Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.”

— Barbara Demick

12. “Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.”

— Barbara Demick

13. “As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.”

— Barbara Demick

14. “The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.”

— Barbara Demick

15. “It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic.”

— Barbara Demick

16. “North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world.”

— Barbara Demick

17. “No force on earth can bar the Korean people from making an onward march for victory in the revolutionary spirit of the “arduous march” and the DPRK will always remain a powerful nation.”

— Barbara Demick

18. “Anybody with a functioning brain cannot not know that something is wrong.”

— Barbara Demick

19. “Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive.”

— Barbara Demick

20. “By the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song later surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed.”

— Barbara Demick

21. “Never mind Communist solidarity, China and the Soviet Union wanted to do business with the likes of Hyundai and Samsung, not with state-owned enterprises in the North that didn’t pay their bills on time.”

— Barbara Demick

22. “Chongjin station. That was where people went when they had nothing left and no place else to go. It wasn’t quite like giving up and lying down by the side of the road. The movement of the trains created an illusion of purpose that kept hope alive against all odds. It allowed one to fantasize that a train would pull into the station with something to eat or that a train might be going someplace better and you could hop aboard.”

— Barbara Demick

23. “If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity.”

— Barbara Demick

24. “In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans.”

— Barbara Demick

25. “At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices.”

— Barbara Demick

26. “In North Korea, you don’t own your own home; you are merely awarded the right to live there.”

— Barbara Demick

27. “The more there was to complain about, the more important it was to ensure that nobody did.”

— Barbara Demick

28. “Often children came in with minor colds or coughs or diarrhea and then suddenly, they were dead.”

— Barbara Demick

29. “When outsiders stare into the void that is today’s North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road – the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.”

— Barbara Demick

30. “Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system. With radios it was easy – open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.”

— Barbara Demick

31. “He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn’t matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.”

— Barbara Demick

32. “Her younger son, twenty, was assigned to a factory that made railroad equipment, but since it provided no salary he was actually paying his workplace three dollars per month so he could stay home to help his mother with the pigs and moonshine.”

— Barbara Demick

33. “Everybody who was going to die was already dead.”

— Barbara Demick

34. “North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.”

— Barbara Demick

35. “He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he’d get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors.”

— Barbara Demick

36. “Neither superpower was willing to cede ground to allow for an independent Korea.”

— Barbara Demick

37. “Because Pyongyang is the only North Korean city frequented by foreigners, the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound.”

— Barbara Demick

38. “Emotions somehow meant more when they were handwritten on precious scraps of paper and conveyed on slow trains running out of fuel.”

— Barbara Demick

39. “When his father turned to walk away, Hyuck noticed for the first time how much his father had aged. The man who once appeared so tall and handsome was now gaunt, his posture stooped, his hair streaked with gray.”

— Barbara Demick

40. “The city of 500,000 is wedged between a granite spine of mountains zigzagging up and down the coast and the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea.”

— Barbara Demick

41. “Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men.”

— Barbara Demick

42. “Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.”

— Barbara Demick

43. “This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don’t stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.”

— Barbara Demick

44. “North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product – as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.”

— Barbara Demick