A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

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?

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

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.