Korea Sad Quotes

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Drying her eyes, Mother said to Totto-chan very slowly, "You're Japanese and Masao-chan comes from a country called Korea. But he's a child, just like you. So, Totto-chan, dear, don't ever think of people as different. Don't think, 'That person's a Japanese, or this person's a Korean.' Be nice to Masao-chan. It's so sad that some people think other people aren't nice just because they're Koreans.
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window)
There’s a saying, “Sadness and gladness follow each other.” As I see it, people who experience equal amounts of sadness and happiness in their lives must be incredibly blessed.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
Love has different shape, like this falling snow in winter
Rizki De (Endless Winter in Korea)
Someone once said, “If a crying baby could tear down the universe, it would.” That’s how I felt that day. I wanted to demolish the whole universe, but the sad truth was, it had already come crashing down around my head.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
achieved what we watched Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, and South Korea achieve. That is a comparison about which we can only feel sad. This is not some abstract exercise, but thirty years of our lives. And God knows how many more such lost and stolen years lie
Alexei Navalny (Patriot: A Memoir)
Stalin has died. The ardent heart of the great leader of progressive mankind has ceased to beat. This sad news has spread over Korean territory like lightning, inflicting a bitter blow to the hearts of millions of people. Korean People’s Army soldiers, workers, farmers, and students, as well as all residents of both South and North Korea, have heard the sad news with profound grief." – Kim Il Sung
Kim Il Sung
I believe in han. There's no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it's some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It's a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world. It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture.
David Chang (Eat a Peach)
Once upon a time there was a garden, surrounded on all sides by a great, high fence. In that garden, an old demon ruled over thousands upon thousands of slaves. But the surprising thing was that the only sound ever to be heard within those high walls was the sound of merry laughter. Hahaha and hohoho, all year round-because of the laughing magic which the old demon had used on his slaves. "Why did he use such magic on them? To conceal his evil mistreatment of them, of course, and also to create a deception, saying, 'This is how happy the people in our garden are.' And that's also why he put the fences up, so that the people in other gardens couldn't see over or come in. So, well, think about it. Where in the world might you find such a garden, such a den of evil magic, where cries of pain and sadness were wrenched from the mouths of its people and distorted into laughter?
Bandi (The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea)
I want to give this food to my family in North Korea. But I can’t. So I entrust it to the seagulls. And in my heart, they carry it off to my family. And I weep.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
As I see it, people who experience equal amounts of sadness and happiness in their lives must be incredibly blessed. Some people lead a painful life full of nothing but sorrow. I should know.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.) Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
The lovely thing about gonorrhea is microscopic, he thought. Reduced to its cellular structure it takes on a spectacular beauty, all stained glass and Persian carpets, shadings and meltings away, subtle shapes interlocking, unfolding, receding into dimness, then recurring boldly at just the right moment. A man holds his injured penis gently, the boy-mouth curls in self-disgust while the fingers that lately gripped a gun and squeezed out streams of bullets are grown suddenly tender, sad and pitying, lifting the sickness up and out, resting it on the burry palm. Were he to weep it would be now when the sweet bird of his youth lies moist of beak, wizening of wing.
Richard Selzer MD (Knife Song Korea: A Novel (Excelsior Editions))
Infantrymen were fighters, not writers. In one way, we prided ourselves on it; we didn’t have time for such “pussy” stuff. But the fact was that infantrymen in Korea came, as a rule, from the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder. The squads were mainly made up of poor whites, blacks, and yellows—a dispensable rainbow—uneducated, with nothing to keep us a step ahead of the point of a bayonet. And if a doughfoot got killed, his parents generally didn’t have the education to write and ask why. They’d silently, stoically wear their loss like a sad badge of honor. In Korea, a heroic, dead comrade-in-arms; at home, a gold star in a cracked window in a little house on the wrong side of the tracks.
David H. Hackworth (About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior)
The Hitler War was my grandfather’s war; my father’s war – his and Uncle George’s – was Korea, which may have been just as well: George is famous for, amongst other superbly unselfconscious comments, his observation that France is a surprisingly nice bit of country, and the French, more agreeable than is commonly supposed, but the food, sadly, very French.
G.M.W. Wemyss
There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you’re a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it’s life or death. But at Harvard, it’s about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue—it wouldn’t hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they’re really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who’s genuinely starving?
Greg Gutfeld (Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You)
Most of them grew up in the States or came here from Korea when they were young. But the way the way they behave around each other-- it was as if they never left. The women are all subservient to their husbands and fathers and in-laws, which always seems so sad to him. Everywhere he looks, a woman is serving a plate of food to someone else. The daughter-in-laws are the easiest to spot, the way them seem so eager to please.
Jung Yun (Shelter)
It’s nice to think that leaders who provide peace and plenty rule for long, happy years, beloved by the people and content to do good for them day and night. But in fact those who want to run a country for a long time are ill advised to go around promoting peace and prosperity. Not that making people well off is inherently bad for leaders; it isn’t. It’s just that promoting corruption and misery is better. That was well understood by Leopold and Mobutu in the Congo, and is clearly understood today by the governments in places like North Korea, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Chad, Syria … sadly, the list goes on. It so happens that leaders who are really good at giving their people life, liberty, and happiness are, overwhelmingly, democratically elected and therefore face organized political competition.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future)
It was like the city was dead – the strangest atmosphere. The people all looked so shabby and aimless in their wandering. There was a feeling of deep sadness in the air…
Kang Chol-Hwan (The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag)
Korea which is now richer country than America and also not have so much political problem, but
Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story)
Their approach is often described as paranoid, but I will argue that there may be no alternative to the current North Korean policies if judged from the prospects of the regime’s survival, which is the supreme goal of North Korean policy makers. Their current survival strategy might inflict considerable suffering on ordinary people, make genuine economic growth impossible, and generate significant international security risks. However, this strategy also ensures that a small hereditary elite keeps enjoying power and (moderate) luxury. And, sadly, there is no alternative that would be acceptable to the decision makers.
Andrei Lankov (The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia)
When the train started moving, a great cacophony of cheering and screaming seemed to come from everywhere. All at once the adults on the train started crying. I wondered why. After all, they were going back to their homeland, so why were they sad? It seemed to portend bad things to come.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
The system had dehumanized them completely. Us. The sad thing was that I was starting to think the same way myself. But Young’s behavior reminded me what it was to be a human being. And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn’t let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
Throughout this book, I will argue against the validity of various cultural truths, but I believe in han. There's no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it's some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It's a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world. It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture.
David Chang (Eat a Peach)
I'm so sad and so mad for many situations and for many reasons! Even though I'm in Korea atm, I know that I'm seeing my whole my fam! But, I feel so isolated and feel so lonely from people and I'm going to see people to interact and talk to them in person and through the msgs/calls. I feel so depressed rn.
100% Savage Queen Sarah
There’s a saying, “Sadness and gladness follow each other.” As I see it, people who experience equal amounts of sadness and happiness in their lives must be incredibly blessed. Some people lead a painful life full of nothing but sorrow. I should know.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
The lovely thing about gonorrhea is microscope, he thought. Reduced to its cellular structure it takes on a spectacular beauty, all stained glass and Persian carpets, shadings and meltings away, subtle shapes interlocking, unfolding, receding into dimness, then recurring boldly at just the right moment. A man holds his injured penis gently, the boy-mouth curls in self-disgust while the fingers that lately gripped a gun and squeezed out streams of bullets are grown suddenly tender, sad and pitying, lifting the sickness up and out, resting it on the burry palm. Were he to weep it would be now when the sweet bird of his youth lies moist of beak, wizening of wing.
Richard Selzer MD (Knife Song Korea: A Novel (Excelsior Editions))
Once upon a time there was a garden, surrounded on all sides by a great, high fence. In that garden, an old demon ruled over thousands upon thousands of slaves. But the surprising thing was that the only sound ever to be heard within those high walls was the sound of merry laughter. Hahaha and hohoho, all year round—because of the laughing magic which the old demon used on his slaves. “Why did he use such magic on them? To conceal his evil mistreatment of them, of course, and also to create a deception, saying, ‘This is how happy the people in our garden are.’ And that’s also why he put the fences up, so that the people in other gardens couldn’t see over or come in. So, well, think about it. Where in the world might you find such a garden, such a den of evil magic, where cries of pain and sadness were wrenched from the mouths of its people and distorted into laughter?” Mrs. Oh began to choke up again, though she herself was not aware of it. The calculation she’d made when she began the tale, that it might offer just a brief moment of respite, had been misguided. The night had deepened; yet another bout of “happy laughter” was spilling out from the loudspeaker, casting into ever-starker relief the plot of that old tale, which was not really old at all.
Bandi (The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea)
Sadness and gladness follow each other.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
There’s a saying, “Sadness and gladness follow each other.” As I see it, people who experience equal amounts of sadness and happiness in their lives must be incredibly blessed. Some people lead a painful life full of nothing but sorrow.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
a clear night in early October 2004. Standing beneath the trees on the riverbank, I stared across at North Korea. The mountains were black against the constellations. Hyesan itself was in utter darkness. I could have been looking at forest, not at a city. It was almost as if the sky was the substance. The city was the void, the nothing. My country lay silent and still. I felt immensely sad for it. It seemed as lifeless as ash.
Hyeonseo Lee (The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story)