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Suki Kim QUOTES

Suki Kim QUOTES

1 " The stars are in your favor, darling, you can't be horrible. Nope, they won't let you. "

― Suki Kim , The Interpreter

2 " You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world "

― Suki Kim , The Interpreter

3 " Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

4 " TIME THERE SEEMED TO PASS DIFFERENTLY. WHEN YOU ARE shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential. That’s how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue. There, in that relentless vacuum, nothing moved. No news came in or out. No phone calls to or from anyone. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

5 " How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

6 " They would swear that the United States was their number one enemy, and yet carrying a pack of Marlboro Lights seemed to be a sign of privilege and class. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

7 " The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

8 " I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

9 " (As for unmarried women, I have no idea where they are buried. For a very long time, in Korea, no one talked about them.) "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

10 " I reminded myself that I did not come from a place where mind games were a prerequisite for survival to such an extreme degree, a place where the slightest act of rebellion could have unimaginable consequences. Slowly, "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

11 " That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

12 " these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

13 " There it is again, the mantra “if only.” I am always made aware of the alternative universe where things turned out differently, in which lives were saved. I am used to the mantra. For immigrants, regret can become a way of life. Shouts "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

14 " that the unfortunate thing about losing the trivia game was that they had been caught cheating and should have cheated better, I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

15 " I sang along, but I could not help noticing that if you replaced the word Jesus with Great Leader, the content was not so different from some of the North Korean songs my students chanted several times each day. In both groups, singing was a joyful, collective ritual from which they took strength. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

16 " They were always comparing themselves to the outside world, which none of them had ever seen, declaring themselves the best. This insistence on “best” seemed strangely childlike, and the words best and greatest were used so frequently that they gradually lost their meaning. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

17 " Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

18 " But the blessing came with its price. Being bilingual, being multicultural should have brought two worlds into one heart, and yet for Suzy, it meant a persistent hollowness. It seems that she needed to love one culture to be able to love the other. Piling up cultural references led to no further identification. What Damian had called a “blessing” pushed her out of context, always. She was stuck in a vacuum where neither culture moved nor owned her. Deep inside, she felt no connection, which Damian seemed to have understood. "

― Suki Kim , The Interpreter

19 " The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

20 " History is a record of many such irrationalities. "

― Suki Kim , Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite