Adam Johnson > Quotes

“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“A name isn't a person,' Ga said. 'Don't ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they're always with you because they're a part of you.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“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, The Orphan Master's Son

“[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“She's read every word I've written," he said. "That's the truest way to know someone's heart.”
― adam johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“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, The Orphan Master's Son

“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, The Orphan Master's Son

“The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Where we are from, he said, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change....But in America, people's stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.”
― Adam Johnson

“Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“It's called a gui-tar. It's used to perform American rural music. It's said to be especially popular in Texas," he told her. "It's also the instrument of choice for playing 'the blues,' which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on.”
― Adam Johnson

“They'd come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it - he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who'd gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“A name isn’t a person,” Ga said. “Don’t ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.” He put his hands on their shoulders. “It’s you that matter, not your names. It’s the two of you I’ll never forget.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It's not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok's car batteries...Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil's tip bursts with expression - squiggles, figures, words - filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil's footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil's next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it's laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“What happened?” Buc asked him. “I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“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, The Orphan Master's Son

“All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“The truth is, though, that you don't need to die to know what it's like to be a ghost.”
― Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles

“. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“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

“You can't leave me. I'm your captive," she said. "What good's a captive without her captor?”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son