Top 60 Yeonmi Park Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

2. “When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy.”

— Yeonmi Park

3. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

4. “It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth.”

— Yeonmi Park

5. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

6. “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?”

— Yeonmi Park

7. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

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

— Yeonmi Park

9. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

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

— Yeonmi Park

11. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

12. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

13. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

14. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

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

— Yeonmi Park

16. “I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe.”

— Yeonmi Park

17. “But as I began to write this book, I realised that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning. With the help of my mother, the memories of our lives in North Korea and China cane back to me like scenes from a forgotten nightmare. Some of the images reappeared with a terrible clarity; others were hazy, or scrambled like a deck of cards spilled on the floor. The process of writing has been the process of remembering, and of trying to make sense out of those memories.”

— Yeonmi Park

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

— Yeonmi Park

19. “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?”

— Yeonmi Park

20. “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.”

— Yeonmi Park

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

— Yeonmi Park

22. “Why does this person, who doesn’t even speak our language, care so much about us that he is willing to risk his life for us? It moved us both to tears. I said a silent prayer of thanks as we became a part of the night.”

— Yeonmi Park

23. “I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.”

— Yeonmi Park

24. “It’s not easy to give up a worldview that is built into your bones and imprinted on your brain like the sound of your own father’s voice.”

— Yeonmi Park

25. “My mother had fought to hold on to her belief that she lived in a good country. She was shocked and saddened to realize how corrupt and pitiless North Korea had become. Now she was even more convinced that she couldn’t let her daughters grow up in such a place. We had to get out as soon as possible.”

— Yeonmi Park

26. “I never knew freedom could be such a cruel and difficult thing. Until now, I had always thought that being free meant being able to wear jeans and watch whatever movies I wanted without worrying about being arrested. Now I realized that I had to think all the time – and it was exhausting. There were times when I wondered whether, if it wasn’t for the constant hunger, I would be better off in North Korea, where all my thinking and all my choices were taken care of for me.”

— Yeonmi Park

27. “In Korea we say that if a person cannot close his eyes in death, it is because he hasn’t fulfilled something in this world.”

— Yeonmi Park

28. “As North Koreans, we were innocent in a way that I cannot fully explain.”

— Yeonmi Park

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

— Yeonmi Park

30. “I couldn’t imagine it was possible for something so beautiful to exist in the same world as me.”

— Yeonmi Park

31. “After I escaped to South Korea, I was surprised to hear that the blossoms and green shoots of spring symbolize life and renewal in other parts in the world. In North Korea, spring is the season of death. It is the time of year when our stores of food are gone, but the farms produce nothing to eat because new crops are just being planted. Spring is when most people died of starvation.”

— Yeonmi Park

32. “There is another Korean saying: “The thread follows the needle.” Usually the man is the needle and the thread is the woman, so the woman follows the husband to his home. But she does not take his name. For many women, it is the only independence that remains in their lives.”

— Yeonmi Park

33. “I felt as if Orwell knew where I was from and what I had been through. The animal farm was really North Korea, and he was describing my life. I saw my family in the animals – my grandmother, mother, father, and me, too: I was like one of the “new pigs” with no ideas. Reducing the horror of North Korea into a simple allegory erased its power over me. It helped set me free.”

— Yeonmi Park

34. “But he was born in North Korea, where family connections and party loyalty are all that matter, and hard work guarantees you nothing but more hard work and a constant struggle to survive.”

— Yeonmi Park

35. “In North Korea, everybody is required to wake up early and spend an hour sweeping and scrubbing the hallways, or tending the area outside their houses. Communal labor is how we keep up our revolutionary spirit and work together as one people. The regime wants us to be like cells in a single organism, where no unit can exist without the others. We have to do everything at the same time, always. So at noon, when the radio goes “beeeep,” everybody stops to eat lunch. There is no getting away from.”

— Yeonmi Park

36. “The doctors in Songnam-ri had to be farmers, too. They cultivated medicinal plants, and actually grew their own cotton to have a supply of bandages and dressings.”

— Yeonmi Park

37. “When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy – and that is one of the very few features of life in North Korea that I actually miss.”

— Yeonmi Park

38. “Through helping others, I learned that I had always had compassion in me, although I hadn’t known it and couldn’t express it. I learned that if I could feel for others, I might also begin to feel compassion for myself. I was beginning to heal.”

— Yeonmi Park

39. “The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.”

— Yeonmi Park

40. “I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped from North Korea.”

— Yeonmi Park

41. “My mother brought my father’s ashes back with her to South Korea. We’re finally together again as a family. I hope someday to honor my father’s final request to bring him back to Hysean, where he can be buried next to his father and grandfather on the hill overlooking the Yalu River. If that time comes, I will visit my grandmother’s grave as well and tell her that, once again, Chosun is whole.”

— Yeonmi Park

42. “I had spent too much energy and time hating and being intolerant of the choices others had made.”

— Yeonmi Park

43. “As soon as I was old enough to understand, my mother warned me that I should be careful about what I was saying. “Remember, Yeonmi-ya,” she said gently, “even when you think you’re alone, the birds and mice can hear you whisper.” She didn’t mean to scare me, but I felt a deep darkness and horror inside me.”

— Yeonmi Park

44. “North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn’t until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink. This is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time – and somehow not go crazy. This.”

— Yeonmi Park

45. “These men were so handsome and spoke with such beautiful accents, like the South Koreans I had watched on pirated videos, that my mother had to nudge my ribs to stop me from staring at them.”

— Yeonmi Park

46. “In South Korea, I learned to hate the question “What do you think?” Who cared what I thought? It took me a long time to start thinking for myself and to understand why my own opinions mattered.”

— Yeonmi Park

47. “Now I realized that I had to think all the time – and it was exhausting.”

— Yeonmi Park

48. “But even in the face of death, betraying the Dear Leader was probably the hardest thing I had ever done. I was beyond the reach of his revenge, yet it felt like his hand was following me everywhere I went, trying to pull me back.”

— Yeonmi Park

49. “Even in big city hospitals there is no such thing as “disposable” supplies. Bandages are washed and reused. Nurses go from room to room using the same syringe on every patient. They know this is dangerous, but they have no choice.”

— Yeonmi Park

50. “North Koreans my age and younger are sometimes called the Jangmadang Generation, because we grew up with markets, and we couldn’t remember a time when the state provided for everyone’s needs. We didn’t have the same blind loyalty to the regime that was felt by our parents’ generation. Still, while the market economy and outside media weakened our dependence on the state, I couldn’t make the mental leap to see the foreign movies and soap operas I loved to watch as models for a life I could lead.”

— Yeonmi Park