Min Jin Lee Famous Quotes
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Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage
Casey meant it when she said, 'Forgive us for our debts as we forgive our debtors,' because they were for her the hardest words to live by, and by saying them, she hoped they'd become possible. Like Ted, Casey would never discuss her ambivalent views on religion. She was honest enough to admit that her privacy cloaked a fear: the fear of being found out as a hypocrite" (Free Food For Millionaires, p.100-101.)
He walked until he couldn't hear her scream his name anymore. He walked rigidly and calmly, not believing that a person you loved - yes he has loved her - could end up being someone you never knew.
the stories of Koreans in Japan should be told somehow when so much of their lives had been despised, denied, and erased.
I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean - or not Korean enough.
It's not that you don't understand, it's that you don't like it.
a man must learn to forgive - to know what is important, that to live without forgiveness was a kind of death with breathing and movement.
Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn't himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn't care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn't possible. It would never be possible with her.
In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am. So what the fuck?
After losing four of his children and his wife to cholera five years ago, Shin found that he could not speak much about loss. Everything a person said sounded glib and foolish.
Etsuko grew silent, utterly transfixed by the realization that how she saw herself was actually how her children saw her, too. They thought she was a monster.
But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much.
What surprised him was that as he felt closer to death, he felt the terror of death, its very finality. There were so many things he had failed to do. There were even more things he should never have done.
There's nothing fucking worse than knowing that you're just like everybody else.
All landowners who were foolish enough to stick around were shot. Communists see people only in simple categories.
...a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn't be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet.
And Mozasu? He is Baek Isak's son? He doesn't look like me." Sunja
Learn everything. Fill your mind with knowledge - it's the only kind of power no one can take away from you." Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.
There was consolation: The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned. Sometimes, she could be in front of a train kiosk or the window of a bookstore, and she could feel Noa's small hand when he was a boy, and she would close her eyes and think of his sweet grassy smell and remember that he had always tried his best. At those moments, it was good to be alone to hold on to him.
People are awful. Drink some beer.
A woman's lot is to suffer.
She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn't himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn't care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be, to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes.
There was more to being something than just blood.
People are rotten everywhere you go. They're no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let's see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants." Sunja
Japan would save China by bringing technological advancements to a rural economy; Japan would end poverty in Asia and make it prosper; Japan would protect Asia from the pernicious hands of Western imperialism; and only Germany, Japan's true and fearless ally, was fighting the evils of the West.
From the moment she'd met him, she'd felt his presence all around her.
It was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful - for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor. When she told her friends in New York about this curious historical anomaly and the pervasive ethnic bias, they were incredulous at the thought that the friendly, well-mannered Japanese they knew could ever think she was somehow criminal, lazy, filthy, or aggressive - the negative stereotypical traits of Koreans in Japan.
Even if there were hundred bad Japanese, if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement
It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two - her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph's strokes.
Casey glanced at her plate again, recalling the posters of her elementary school lunchroom: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. So, how much you ate indicated the quantity of your desire. Walter was also implying that how quickly you got your food revealed the likelihood of achieving your goals. She was in fact terribly hungry, but she'd pretended to be otherwise to be ladylike and had moved away from the table to be agreeable, and now she'd continue to be hungry (Free Food For Millionaires, p.92.)
It was much smaller than her own, but everyone seemed closer, as if each member were organically attached to one seamless body, whereas her enormous extended family felt like cheerfully mismatched Lego bricks in a large bucket.