The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary?

“It’s a pretty simple tale. Though descended from impure bloodlines, he joined the guerrillas to fight the Japanese. His comrades doubted his loyalties. To prove they could trust him with their lives, he took his own.”

“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.”

if there’s one commodity we have no shortage of in North Korea, it’s forever.

Rumina sang in Korean, and her dress was graphite, and she might as well have sung of a spider that spins white thread to capture her listeners.

“My poor little orphan,” she said. “An orphan’s father is twice as important. Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.”

Jun Do fell asleep at his station, a rarity. He woke to the voice of the girl who rowed in the dark. She’d been rowing in the nude, she said, and under a sky that was “black and frilled, like a carnation stemmed in ink.” She’d had a vision that humans would one day return to the oceans, growing flippers and blowholes, that humanity would become one

papered. There was no laundry hanging

“Your Captain fought back,” she told him. “He resisted, he wouldn’t let them take his identity. He died free.”