The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
Hyeonseo Lee
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.”
“This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.”
“I had to learn Mandarin. And I had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and urgent.”
“I wanted to belong, like everyone else around me did, but there was no country I could say was mine. I had no one to tell me that many other people in the world have a fragmented identity; that it doesn’t matter. That who we are as a person is what’s important.”
“In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm?”
“He’d valued his dignity more than his own life.”
“Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear. They are governed by the whim of one man, who can’t draw upon a wealth of discussion and debate, as democracies can, because he rules through terror and the only truth permitted is his own.”
“I was already hiding beneath so many lies that I hardly knew who I was any more. I was becoming a non-person.”
“In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to the Kim dynasty.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes. Humans are selfish and care only for themselves and their families. Am I any different?..... Not only did I believe that humans were selfish and base, I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad – content to destroy lives for their own gain.”
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Book Keywords:
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