Ej Koh Quotes

Neither happiness nor sadness are ever done with us. They are always passing by.

Nobody loves you like your mother and father. Not your husband, and not your children. While your parents are alive, eat as much of their love as you can, so it can sustain you for the rest of your life.

Our feelings are different (because our thoughts are different). Because our wants are different. Actually, everyone's the same. Our sadness, sometimes, our joys.

When you feel a little better, if you want to talk to Mommy again, call me. I’ll be waiting.

When you age, wrinkles don’t make you older. They make you look more like yourself,” she warned me. “Everything comes to the surface eventually.

What we see changes according to what we look for.

You know my grandmothers,” I said, and pointed at my nose, a habit I had picked up when I lived in Japan. “I’m an accumulation of their lives. Whatever I say or do now can give relief to the past—and to them. I don’t believe they’re ever gone.

What I had meant to say in the kitchen was that I had loved fish since I was little—white bite, crispy skin. I had been waiting for it so long that the picture of soft flesh decomposed and left bones for a fossil. When I had argued in the kitchen, I was arguing about what was lost to me. Like how I could not read the letters because of the old water stains that had spread ink across the bottom of the page. The problem was not the damage but the cause. I recognized the tears my younger self had wept while touching the shapes on the paper.

I ignored my desk and watched the storefronts and houses regurgitate objects through their doorways.

In Buddhist tradition, forty-nine is the number of days a soul wanders the earth for answers before the afterlife.

They say a person has so unique a set of meanings we ought to be incapable of understanding each other, yet we speak and teach as if by magic.

You wouldn’t understand,” she said, and frowned. “My daughter teaches people how to let go.

I’m calling you because I miss you,” she said. “Did you pick up because you miss me too?

Your brother can be mean only when he is unsure of himself.

Some believe that if we’re not smart like your mother and brother, we can’t accomplish things. But we can if we are: one, funny, and two, humble.

Solitude was an aspect of my life, though it seemed I could forget it with laughter.

If you have something better to be doing than poetry, which means almost anything else, that is the thing you should be doing right now,” he said to the class. Then, he turned to me. “There’s nowhere else you could be?” “No,” I said to him. “Nowhere.” “You made the right choice. Poetry is better than nothing,” he said to me. “But you have nothing to fall back on.” He was careful not to ask any more questions. He must have sensed I was embarrassed to speak in front of the others, who were confident and sharp. The professor took out the napkin and let it open in his hand. “I’m going to be honest with all of you.” The room looked at each other. The professor said to the class, “If you have something else, and you can do something else, then don’t let it go. Most of you will go back to doing that thing.

I wrote about a place called Alki Beach. When I had first crossed the bridge into West Seattle, I could see the city skyline over Puget Sound. I stood on a strip of purple-gray beach sand. A pier house sold hairy mussels and one-hour bike rentals. Copper and metal signs whipped against the wind. Old couples toted bouquets under wooden pergolas. Those singing and strolling on the beach eventually curved around the bend toward the northern arc and out of sight. I wanted to live here by its waters, read its signs, admire the wind as one admires an old friend. The skyscrapers across the water might be a bracelet across my wrist—the Ferris wheel, city stadium, ships in the harbor. I had never known that joy was a practice the way poetry was a practice. Somebody asked if they could

We used our gestures, but we were amazed, if not at speaking in English with other Koreans, then that we were doing these things in Japan. Could we feel so delighted if we had met any other way? The ashes collected and I smiled even if I knew they would appear this one time in my life. Like the others, they would go, their faces made strange again.

She never asked me to speak but to understand, rather than endure to forgive, and never to sacrifice, only to let go.

When you’re normal, you feel down. More so than others. And that’s okay. You’re going to feel down a lot, but that’s your normal.

When you die, your soul wanders the earth for answers before the afterlife.” Da Hee checked for rain before she put her umbrella in her canvas bag. “This transition between life and death takes forty-nine days,” she

mother returned with two burritos wrapped in foil and extra sauces she laid out over a quilt of napkins on the table. “Let’s have a picnic.” She split the burritos in halves. “Are you done with your lesson plan—?

There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most.

It was better to pay for your children than to stay with them. That was how it had always been.

Some say brothers cannot replace mothers and fathers. My mother called after he had left and said, “I’m not there, so your brother will take his anger out on you. Mommy knows all too well. Try to remember that he is mad at me, not you.

It’s all my doing. I made her suffer too much. I didn’t know what to give her, so I gave her pain. She’s lovely, isn’t she?

Do you know what happens after I’m gone?” she asked me. “You have to raise yourself with dignity. Your brother can be mean only when he is unsure of himself. But he loves you. We will look back at our time apart and laugh together and be sad, but we will have many stories. If you have no suffering, you have no story to tell—isn’t it true?

– What we see changes according to what we look for.

Privacy is the shadow of grief.

When you’re having a hard time, tell somebody. If you want to throw a tantrum, you should try it.