Top 50 Park Yeon-mi Quotes

I heard about desert, but I never seen them with my eyes. I just couldn’t believe there was nothing, except sand and except the stars in the sky.

Before Kim Jong Il died, it wasn’t like one day Kim Jong Un took over. Kim Jong Il made sure his son was known to the North Korean people and it was clear that he was the next heir. He prepared him for at least three years beforehand.

I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever see men as normal people and I could never trust them. I couldn’t bear any human connection with men.

I can’t say if I enjoy the attention or not. It’s really exhausting. But every speech and every interview is extremely important to me because it could be my last one.

I’ll live longer than Kim Jong-un – he’s fatter than me. He doesn’t like me.

I thought North Koreans were the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people hating this country in this country.

That is what is happening in America. People see things, but still they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.

I don’t think anyone should have power over me, or have the right to tell me what to say or how to think. That’s not right. I want to be free.

I didn’t know who Bob Geldof or Richard Branson were and I thought Dublin was part of England.

North Korea is a very Confucius country. We respect the elders, the hierarchy. It’s not like America where anyone can step up and do things, we have our tradition.

North Korea cannot change because its people don’t realize that there is an alternative to their suffering.

North Korea was pretty insane. Like the first thing my mom taught me was don’t even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me. She told me the most dangerous thing that I had in my body was my tongue.

I really had loving parents, and my father was the example of perseverance… he never gave up, and he taught me it’s so easy to give up, but to fight is harder.

If there is no word that means you don’t have the concept. In North Korea they eliminate the words: depression, stress, dictatorship, human rights. You cannot think of those. That’s why all the brainwashing was possible.

I didn’t know what freedom was. I didn’t even know the word. I didn’t know the concept. I never heard of that word, ‘freedom.’ To me, the happiest thing was having food.

I think my father would have become a millionaire if he had grown up in South Korea or the United States… Almost anywhere else, business would have been my father’s vocation. But in North Korea, it was simply a means to survive.

English is my third language.

I was born at the end of the 1993. The regime stopped giving food to the people. Three million people died from 1995 to 1998. It’s one of the world’s worst man-made famines in history.

Family are everything; everyone understands the strength of family. For me, they were the reason that I managed to get by while I was in captivity and now they are the reason to live in freedom.

All the foreign movies we saw about love affected me and my generation. Now we no longer want to die for the regime, we want to die for love.

I was a slave. I was sold in China in 2007 as a child at 13 years old.

When I was invited to return to the 2015 One Young World summit in Bangkok, I knew that I had to make it back. One Young World had given me a platform, and for me it was vitally important for new delegates to hear about North Korea.

North Korea spends billions of dollars to make this nuke test system. If they would spend just 20 percent of what they spent on making nuclear weapons, nobody would have to die in North Korea from hunger but the regime chose to make us hungry.

Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was ‘safe space.’ Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.

I do want to go home. That’s my dream. North Korea is still my home.

In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader was starving. He’s the fattest guy – how can anyone believe that?

I mean I could not trust men again. I hated men. I hated humanity. How on earth can people sell each other?

I never heard my father telling my mother that he loved her. And my mother never told me she loved me, either.

My concern is: How on earth is anything more urgent than the lives of people in North Korean concentration camps?

I had to look for food all the time. I had to catch dragonflies, grasshoppers, and that was the only source of protein for me.

South Koreans often don’t think of North Korean defectors as Korean. While we have been granted citizenship, the locals don’t consider us as South Korean citizens. We are often treated differently and viewed differently, even by people who care for us the most.

I thought, if I go to China, I might find food to eat. The only reason to escape was to find a bowl of rice. And I was trafficked and sold in China.

I am an ambitious person. In the West, being ambitious isn’t a bad thing. You work hard and you have a purpose in life. But in North Korea, you can never be individualistic. You can never live for yourself. You have to live for the regime.

I learnt about the universe. I learnt about human rights and human dignity – this was so new to me.

I do think sometimes, I wonder is it true that every life is equal in this world? Do we care about North Korean lives?

If I keep silent, I am betraying my people.

I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.

I don’t think I will ever understand what freedom means, but I am enjoying learning.

I surrendered all my privacy to write this book. It was so hard and so painful. I went through so much crazy stuff. But I wanted people to realize that North Koreans are just like them.

They said if you are in China you have to be sold, you have to get married. And something that still saddens me is that I actually didn’t care, I was so hungry.

If I could’ve had the things that Americans throw away, I never would’ve escaped North Korea. That’s how much we were desperate.

I just never learned to think critically.

In North Korea, when there is an alarm, it means that there is a war drill. It means that you need to run.

I literally crossed through the middle of the Gobi Desert to be free. But what I did was nothing, so many people fought harder than me and didn’t make it.

Risking your life is not an easy thing to do.

I thought Kim Jong Il was a god who could read my mind. I thought his spirit never dies, and I never thought he was a normal human being.

There is a holocaust going on in my country, the world needs to acknowledge that and do something to help the people of North Korea.

I was able to see the lights coming from China. If maybe I could go where the lights are I could find something to eat, that’s why I escaped.

I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea… I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice.

North Korea publicly denounced me as an enemy of my people and punished all my relatives. They have this guilty by association policy and they go after three generations of your family or up to eight generations of your family.