Han Kang Quotes

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

Why, is it such a bad thing to die?

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.

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

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

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

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.

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.

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.

After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.

Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.

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

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.

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

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.

Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.

She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She'd been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she'd never even known they were there.

It's your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you're free to do just as you like.

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.

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. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.

Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity.

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

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...

There are certain memories that remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is colored by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.

If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.

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.

Conscience. Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.

Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?

I’m not an animal anymore, sister,” she said, first scanning the empty ward as if about to disclose a momentous secret. “I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight.

Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away. Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.

Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness.

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

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.

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

Sand And she frequently forgot, That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand. That it had shattered and is shattering still. Slipping stubbornly through fingers.

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.

I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race.

Why are we walking in the dark, let's go over there, where the flowers are blooming.

I have dreams too, you know. Dreams…and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over…but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because…because then…

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.

Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process

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.

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.

After you were lost to us, all our hours declined into evening. Evening are our streets and our houses. In this half-light that no longer darkens nor lightens, we eat, and walk, and sleep.

Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.

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.

You said, This thing we call life mustn’t ever become something endured.

It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanking, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it's as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

If only one’s eyes weren’t visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one’s eyes from the world.

Do you ever wonder at the strangeness of it? That our bodies have eyelids and lips, that they can at times be made to close from the outside, and at other times to lock fast from within.

There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. Sleet falls as she walks these streets, holding this knowledge inside her. Sleet that leaves cheeks and eyebrows heavy with moisture. Everything passes.

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

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.

For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she'd so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted.

Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay. Still okay. So why do they keep on shrinking? Not even round anymore. Why? Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening–what am I going to gouge

You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.

You said, Beauty is only that which is intense, has a vibrant energy. You said, This thing we call life mustn't ever become something endured.

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.

Sister,” Yeong-hye said, her voice low and calm as if intending to comfort her. Yeong-hye’s old black sweater gave off the faint scent of mothballs. When In-hye didn’t answer, Yeong-hye whispered one more time. “Sister…all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters.

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

Me aterra el silencio del espacio por el que se expande mi voz. Me aterra no poder enmendar las palabras una vez pronunciadas, que esas palabras sepan mucho más de lo que yo sé.

I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.

The body that had caused me such shame was going to be devoured by the flames--that was no cause for regret. I wanted to pare myself down to a simpler existence, just as I had while I'd still been alive. I was determined not to be afraid of anything.

The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive

Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother's memory again.

She watches the streaks of rain lashing the window, with the untouched steadiness unique to those accustomed to solitude.

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time's keen edges are constantly renewed.

I looked on in silence as my face blackened and swelled, my features turned into festering ulcers, the contours that had defined me, that had given me clear edges, crumbled into ambiguity, leaving nothing that could be recognized as me.

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.

The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?” You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you’d wanted to ask.

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.

I don’t know you,” she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. “So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.

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

At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd.

Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.

March 24, 2018 How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies? Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame?

That human beings are also constructed of something other than flesh and muscle seemed to her like a strange stroke of luck.

Dreams overlaid with dreams, a palimpsest of horror.

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only thing that are left behind when all else is abraded.

This life needed only one of us to live. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible. Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces.

No lo puedo entender. Tú eres el que ha muerto, pero siento que todo me abandona. Tú eres el que ha muerto, pero son mis recuerdos los que sangran, se manchan, se oxidan y resquebrajan.

She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father's temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

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.

Breath-cloud. On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living. Proof of our bodies’ warmth. Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives’ miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air.

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. —

White hair. She remembers one of her bosses, a middle-aged man who used to say how he longed to see a former lover again in old age, when her hair would be feather-white. When we’re really old... when every single strand of our hair has gone white, I want to see her then, absolutely. If there was a time when he would want to see her again, it would certainly be then. When both young and flesh would have fallen away. When there would be no time left for desire. When only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.

The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior.

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.

To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch. Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack. When she found that physical process too much to bear, she became paradoxically more verbose.

Now and then she finds herself wondering, and not out of self-pity, but with a detached, almost idle curiosity: If you could add up all the pills she’d ever taken, what would the total be? How many hours of pain has she lived through? As though life itself wished to impede her progress, she was brought up short again and again. As though the force that prevents her moving forward to the light stands always at the ready inside her own body. All those hours when she had lost her way, in hesitation and in doubt. How many would there be? How many small white pills?

Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up despising my own body, the very physical stuff of my self? That I will fully destroy the warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive.

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had never done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm.