The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I'd known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn't be possible, since it's illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I'd thought I'd had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I've learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash through whatever is thrown at you next. Once the dust clears you will be standing tall, a champion, a victor. NOTHING will be able to knock you down once you've taken the biggest hits this life has to offer, so come on life, BRING IT!

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.