Morgan Vickery

“A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

“Dr. Kim couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.

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, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

“As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

“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, Nothing to Envy: Life, Love and Death in North Korea