Shin Kyung-sook Quotes

We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences.

How can you live without trusting people? There are more people who are good than people who are bad!

Yes, I had turned a deaf ear to my girlhood with my silence. It was a time when I was unable to love myself, so I had to go from fifteen straight to twenty. Whether I started walking out of my past or walked into it from the present, my footprints always came to a stop in the same place. I would go from being fifteen to twenty, or go from being twenty to fifteen, If I set out from the past, I had to ignore sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and skip straight to twenty. If I set out from the present, I had to ignore nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, and skip straight to fifteen. Those years always remained vacant, like naked sunlight, like the well with its bottom completely covered.

I had no way of knowing where it began or where it ended. Only that it flowed without restraint.

I wanted to write not because I thought writing would bring about change. I simply loved it. Writing, in itself, allowed me to dream about things that in reality were impossible to achieve, things that were forbidden. From where had that dream seeped in? I consider myself as a member of society. If I can dream through my writing, doesn't that mean the society can dream, too? Oppa. When I think about writing, I think I am reminded of the penetrating eyes of a dog gazing at his master. The beauty of the face in those eyes, the sadness that comes from submitting to love, the silence that comes from having seen what it should not have.

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.

That your wife truly loved the world, and that you loved her.

Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong.

i can't wait for the years to pass Jung Yoon, he said in hollow voice. Can't wait to be older, when i will understand, even if i can't forgive. Can't wait to become strong.

If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife. Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn't speak politely to your wife. That's what you did.

People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?

Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture.

I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?

Nature reminds me that I am human. Nature reminds me that I am a weak being, standing with my feet, upon thus perilous Earth.

If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?

Growing old does not make us any better at loving one another or understanding the meaning of life or death. Nor does knowledge come with the passage of time.

Even though nobody knew that you were in my life, you were the person who brought a raft at every rapid current and helped me cross that water safely. I was happy that you were there. I came to tell you I was able to travel through my life because I could come to you when I was anxious, not when I was happy.

She says that all the things that have happened are actually in the present, that old things are all mixed up in current things, and current things mingle with future things, and future things are combined with old things; it's just that we can't feel it.