Kyung-sook Shin Quotes

#1. The shimmering, lucid tones and silver melancholy of I'll Be Right There give readers a South Korea peopled with citizens fighting for honor and intellectual freedom, and longing for love and solace. Kyung-Sook Shin's characters have unforgettable voices-it's no wonder she has so many fans.

Susan Straight

#2. How far back does one's memory of someone go?

Kyung-Sook Shin

#3. If there were no sea between you and me...there wouldn't be this painful goodbye

Kyung-Sook Shin

#4. The trust that had been building inside each of us spread throughout the classroom. Had one of the windows broken at that moment, not even the sound of breaking glass could have disturbed the gentle stillness.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#5. History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface... Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined... About making a mess of things, all over again.

Kyung-Sook Shin

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

Shin Kyung-sook

#7. You should only ask someone if they love you if you love them, regardless of what the answer might be.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#8. Try thinking of sleep as a kind of rebirth.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#9. In this age when words have lost their value, this age that is therefore dominated by violent words, by words swollen and yellowed with starvation, I have lost the will to speak any more of words. My despair over words is not an admittance of defeat in life.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#10. Once her tears started, she always had hard time stopping, to the extent that i wondered how she was able to hold them in the first place.

Kyung-Sook Shin

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

Shin Kyung-sook

#12. Now I know that anytime you see a "no trespassing" sign, it means you've got to go in and take a look.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#13. Taking his hand and letting it go was my way of saying goodbye.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#14. 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.

Shin Kyung-sook

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

Shin Kyung-sook

#16. One thing i am sure of is that our brief conversation in the dark showed him who i really am. I am a dumb fuck.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#17. The candy melted smoothly and easily on my tongue. I had no idea anything in the world could taste like that. I thought i would turn to stone right there.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#18. I guess saying goodbye makes us reach out for those we would ordinarily ignore. Maybe we care about them more, too, when it is time to part.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#19. 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?

Kyung-Sook Shin

#20. You're paved in my heart like an old road. Like the pebbles in a pebble field, dirt in dirt, dust in dust, cobwebs in cobwebs.

Shin Kyung-sook

#21. 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.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#22. If only we could have met each other sooner. We had led such poor and fragile lives, each alone.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#23. You could say that he split his day in half on order to travel between east and west. Some say that it shows how refined he was, but I see it as mental struggle to not be sucked under by either side.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#24. If only i had known that the moment you think everything has ended, something new is beginning.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#25. your and your wife's fingers and toes after your deaths.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#26. You realize how selfish you were to wish that your wife survived you. It was your selfishness that made you deny that your wife had a serious illness.

Kyung-Sook Shin

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

Kyung-Sook Shin

#28. We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#29. He laughed and said, I don't believe it either but i want to believe it!

Kyung-Sook Shin

#30. 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.

Shin Kyung-sook

#31. 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?

Shin Kyung-sook

#32. Maybe if we hug a hundred strangers, he said, something will change.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#33. The boy's walk was as distinct as hers. He looked like someone who walked on air, rather than someone who lived with his feet on the ground.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#34. If you don't want to cook, you should try throwing a dish.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#35. If I opened my mouth to say a single word, all of the other expired words would have followed and spilled to the ground, as if the string that held them together had snapped.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#36. A house takes on the characteristics of its occupant, and, depending on who lives in it, it can become a very good house or a very strange house.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#37. I though it was weird to see people sleeping. It scared me to see them with their eyes closed. Like they might never wake up again.

Kyung-Sook Shin

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

Shin Kyung-sook

#39. I didn't have anything to say to him, but I looked for him all the same.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#40. I walked behind my father on the way to her headstone, he looked like a house that was caving in.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#41. Everyone has his or her own means of defining value.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#42. Either a mother and daughter know each other very well or they are strangers.

Shin Kyung-sook

#43. Viewing the world from a different angle made it all look strange and dynamic, as if seeing it for the first time.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#44. Leave her be," he said. "She'll stop when she's ready.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#45. Each time i thought about him, the idea that i would never be able to reach him spread through my mind like a shadow.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#46. The thought of life without her makes me feel like I'm trapped inside a cave.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#47. What did one saggy boob say to the other? We better perk up or somebody is going to think we're nuts.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#48. 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.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#49. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?

Kyung-Sook Shin

#50. You left this house whenever you wanted to, and came back at your whim, and you never once thought that your wife would be the one to leave.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#51. She said that cats were more attached to places than to people. And that was why cats are often found in abandoned houses.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#52. He said that the plane was too fast, that his body had arrived fast. That he was just ill because his soul could not keep pace with the speed of the plane and was still on its way home, and he would feel better once his soul had caught up.

Kyung-Sook Shin

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

Shin Kyung-sook

#54. Broken down into hours, the number would be unimaginable. -i'll be right there.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#55. Architects have to know everything there is to know about a space. You have to know its past and present. That way you can build its future.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#56. What kind of writer are you?" You can't think of a single sentence that would satisfy Hyong-chol. Your

Kyung-Sook Shin

#57. It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#58. 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.

Shin Kyung-sook

#59. When someone stubbornly insists that they saw something with their own eyes, i take it as a statement mixed with wishful thinking. As what they want to believe.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#60. Myungsuh scratched his head and smiled. It was a bashful smile, but it spread from ear to ear. You couldn't help but smile, too, when you saw it.

Kyung-Sook Shin