Leonid Petrov Korea expert lecturer in Korean Studies The University of Sydney Quotes

“Felix Abt prefers to stay apolitical and impartial when sharing his thoughts and memories of the seven-year sojourn. From the book we can see that he loves Korea and cares about its people. In his assessments of North Korea's past and present the author approaches all issues from a human (and humanistic) perspective, trying to show life in the country without political or ideological coloring.”

“There are two kinds of games in economics. One is the game where people use only legal moves. Then there is the true game, the one like real life, where the strategies and moves people make, some of them contain illegal gains.”

“Legal behavior is not incompatible with rational, self-interested behavior.”

“Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.”

“Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?”

“I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.”

“Men cannot make good decisions about their lifelong mate when driven by the passions of youth. If Pakal is continuing to see this woman, I will immediately put this to an end." -- Sak K'uk, Queen Mother of Janaab Pakal, Ruler of Palenque.”

“I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince.”

“There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.”

“I was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I heard Coretta cry, "Martin, Martin, come quickly!" I put down my cup and ran toward the living room. As I approached the front window Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: "Darling, it's empty!”