Quotes by Kyung-Sook Shin

When I lived here and woke up from the fog in my head, I would walk by myself to the grave site set aside for me, so that I could feel comfortable if I lived there after death.

But, Aunt... I dont want to go to the grave site set aside for me a few years ago at the ancestral grave site. I dont want to go there. When I lived here and woke up from the fog in my head, I would walk by myself to the grave site set aside for me, so that I could feel comfortable if I lived there after death. It was sunny, and I liked the pine tree that stood bent but tall, but remaining a member of this family even in death would be too much and too hard. To try to change my mind, I would sing and pull weeds, sitting there until the sun set, but nothing made me feel comfortable there. I lived with this family for over fifty years; please let me go now.

All I wanted was for you to be free from everything. And with that freedom, you often showed me another world, so I wanted you to be even freer. I wanted you to be so free that you would live your life for other people.

Youre paved in my heart like an old road. Like the pebbles in a pebble field, dirt in dirt, dust in dust, cobwebs in cobwebs.

I’m trying to think about what I can do. But instead all that comes to mind are the things I can’t do. How do we judge truth and goodness? Where are justice and righteousness hiding? A society that is violent or corrupt prohibits mutual communication. A society that fears communication is unable to solve any problem. It looks for someone to shift the responsibility to and turns even more violent.

I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else.

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. Insofar as everything is always changing, so our sense of hope shall never die out. Therefore, I leave you all with one final thought: Live. Until you are down to your final breath, love and fight and rage and grieve and live.

Now I know that anytime you see a “no trespassing” sign, it means you’ve got to go in and take a look.

When he came home with the traditional gift of underwear bought with his first paycheck, she barely looked at it, and coldly shot at him, “What about what you were going to be?

You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized.

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Moms everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didnt think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.

Everyone has his or her own means of defining value.

...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 havent forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didnt have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldnt 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 Moms dreams?

Moms eyes held yours for a moment. I dont like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not. Moms expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, If you only do what you like, whos going to do what you dont like?

He looked so silly that I could not stop laughing, even as my tears kept flowing. Is the root of laughter also sorrow? As I laughed, I was filled with both joy and sorrow.

I used to think that sharing secrets always brought people closer. So I revealed secrets I did not want known in order to feel closer to someone. Oh, the loss I felt when I found out the secrets that I had held dear, that were so difficult to say out loud, that I had kept to myself, were being spread around the next day as if they were nothing! I think that was the moment I realized that pouring your heart out to someone might not bring you closer but in fact make you poorer instead. I even though maybe growing close to someone was better achieved by empathizing in silence.

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?

Full of questions and pleas, her eyes seemed to be asking for rescue.