Han Kang Quotes

#1. After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.

Han Kang

#2. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals. -

Han Kang

#3. Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment.

Han Kang

#4. It melted in the rain ... it all melted ... I'd been just about to go down into the earth. There was nothing else for it if I wanted to turn myself upside down again, you see.

Han Kang

#5. Why is such a bad thing to die?

Han Kang

#6. Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness

Han Kang

#7. Summer nights, washing my neck and back in the yard. The rope of cold water you pumped into the metal pail, scattering into brilliant jewels as you splashed it over my sweat-gummed skin. Remember how you laughed, watching me shudder and oooh.

Han Kang

#8. It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.

Han Kang

#9. I'm fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

Han Kang

#10. the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes.

Han Kang

#11. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.

Han Kang

#12. Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.

Han Kang

#13. Look, sister, I'm doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands...they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly...yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide...

Han Kang

#14. How on earth could a complete stranger be expected to tease out the inner logic of something he himself had dreamed up, to find a way to make it come alive?

Han Kang

#15. Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time.

Han Kang

#16. When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there's simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.

Han Kang

#17. Why, is it such a bad thing to die?

Han Kang

#18. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.

Han Kang

#19. I was convinced that there was more going on here than a simple case of vegetarianism.

Han Kang

#20. There's nothing wrong with keeping quiet, after all, hadn't women traditionally been expected to be demure and restrained?

Han Kang

#21. As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families - they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence

Han Kang

#22. Perhaps the only things he truly loved were his images - those he'd filmed, or then again, perhaps only those he had yet to film.

Han Kang

#23. Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way

Han Kang

#24. But at the same time you know that if a time like that spring were to come around again, and even knowing what you know now, you might well end up making a similar choice to the one you'd made then.

Han Kang

#25. This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.

Han Kang

#26. IF only one's eyes weren't visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one's eyes from the world.

Han Kang

#27. The pain feels like a hole swallowing her up, a source of intense fear and yet, at the same time, a strange, quiet peace.

Han Kang

#28. She's a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

Han Kang

#29. I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.

Han Kang

#30. A soul doesn't have a body, so how can it be watching us?

Han Kang

#31. I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't realised was there.

Han Kang

#32. Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.

Han Kang