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

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

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " (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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world, and converting its people would guarantee the missionaries a spot in heaven. "

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

19 " For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng. "

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

20 " I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated. "

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