Tteokbokki Quotes

I hope you will listen to a certain overlooked and different voice within you. Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too.

What do I wish for? I want to love and be loved. Without suspicion, and with ease.

I’m sad, but I’m alive, and living through it. That is my solace and my joy.

I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way.

Art has given me faith: faith that today may not have been perfect but was still a pretty good day, or faith that even after a long day of being depressed, I can still burst into laughter over something very small.

Being imperfect is all right and being awkward is okay. You don’t have to cheer up. I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way. And that’s fine.

I want to own my own life. To do everything I want to do, so I don’t live a life of regret.

Life is all about getting better and getting worse and getting better again, so getting worse is a natural part of life and I just have to learn to deal with it.

Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed. That’s one of the nicest things about books.

Sometimes the best thing to do with people who would never listen to you in the first place is to avoid them altogether.

I think when you look at as many sides of a person as possible, you stop disliking them.

If I go with someone else, I have to compromise on the things we can do together, but I figured if I went alone, I would get to choose whatever I wanted to do.

people who don’t try to gain something from outside of themselves are those who end up gaining the most, that self-esteem and pride come from letting go of external validation.

Meeting someone who moves your heart, writing something until it moves the hearts of others, listening to music and watching movies that depict love – I want to always be motivated by love.

Sometimes the best thing to do with people who would never listen to you in the first place is to avoid them altogether. To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavour for any one person. You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.

I think you need to spatially separate your work and your rest. If you were stressed at work, you ought to be relaxing when you’re home, but you’re sitting at home listening to recordings of yourself. This mixes up the two spaces, which makes you feel near-constant shame and anxiety

I want to love and be loved. I want to find a way where I don’t hurt myself. I want to live a life where I say things are good more than things are bad. I want to keep failing and discovering new and better directions. I want to enjoy the tides of feeling in me as the rhythms of life. I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time. Some day, I will.

En lugar de compararte con otras personas, compárate con tu yo del pasado.

Instead of being disappointed, try thinking this way: They’re living and breathing human beings too.

if someone has high self-esteem, they don’t really care what other people think about them.

I hope you learn to look at a person as a whole before judging them.

It’s like I know everything is fine, but I can’t stop myself from endlessly checking to make sure it really is fine, and in the process I make myself miserable.

I don't think you need to find the reason for everyting in yourself. You could've just been having a bad day.

Sometimes, this directive to cheer up and buck up is like poison that rots one’s soul. Note that the bestselling self-help books and essay collections of the past ten years aren’t about whipping yourself, they’re about healing and consolation. Being imperfect is all right and being awkward is okay. You don’t have to cheer up. I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way. And that’s fine.

when you’re thinking something, your emotions are mixed up in it. And you’re still inside your ‘feeling at the time.’ But once you put the situation outside of yourself by using words, you can judge the situation from an observer’s perspective. Rationally.

It's no use to hold on to the empty shell of a love that's past, to try to win back a heart that will never return, or to let your regrets seat you up from the inside... There really is no torture greater than endlessly rambling on about unshakeable feelings for another person.

I thought about why I am overly polite to people who are not important to me. It’s because they can hate me at any time. Because they can judge me and resent me for the smallest things I do. Meanwhile, because the people who love me already love me, and there’s a low chance they’ll start to hate me, I get snappy with them.

Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too.

I'm sad, but I'm alive, and living through it. That is my solace and my joy.

Behind the counters, women in visors work without stopping. It’s a beautiful, holy place. A cafeteria full of people from all over the world who have been displaced in a foreign country, each with a different history. Where did they come from and how far did they travel? Why are they all here? To find the galangal no American supermarket stocks to make the Indonesian curry that their father loves? To buy the rice cakes to celebrate Jesa and honor the anniversary of their loved one’s passing? To satisfy a craving for tteokbokki on a rainy day, moved by a memory of some drunken, late-night snack under a pojangmacha tent in Myeong-dong?

I think you tend to focus too much on your ideals and pressure yourself by thinking, I have to be this kind of person! Even when those ideals are, in fact, taken from someone else and not from your own thoughts and experiences.

You have this superego that exerts control over you, a superego built not only from your own experiences but cobbled together from all sorts of things that you admire, creating an idealised version of yourself. But that idealised version of yourself is, in the end, only an ideal. It’s not who you actually are. You keep failing to meet that ideal in the real world, and then you punish yourself.

Inside an H Mart complex, there will be some kind of food court, an appliance shop, and a pharmacy. Usually, there's a beauty counter where you can buy Korean makeup and skin-care products with snail mucin or caviar oil, or a face mask that vaguely boasts "placenta." (Whose placenta? Who knows?) There will usually be a pseudo-French bakery with weak coffee, bubble tea, and an array of glowing pastries that always look much better than they taste. My local H Mart these days is in Elkins Park, a town northeast of Philadelphia. My routine is to drive in for lunch on the weekends, stock up on groceries for the week, and cook something for dinner with whatever fresh bounty inspires me. The H Mart in Elkins Park has two stories; the grocery is on the first floor and the food court is above it. Upstairs, there is an array of stalls serving different kinds of food. One is dedicated to sushi, one is strictly Chinese. Another is for traditional Korean jjigaes, bubbling soups served in traditional earthenware pots called ttukbaegis, which act as mini cauldrons to ensure that your soup is still bubbling a good ten minutes past arrival. There's a stall for Korean street food that serves up Korean ramen (basically just Shin Cup noodles with an egg cracked in); giant steamed dumplings full of pork and glass noodles housed in a thick, cakelike dough; and tteokbokki, chewy, bite-sized cylindrical rice cakes boiled in a stock with fish cakes, red pepper, and gochujang, a sweet-and-spicy paste that's one of the three mother sauces used in pretty much all Korean dishes. Last, there's my personal favorite: Korean-Chinese fusion, which serves tangsuyuk---a glossy, sweet-and-sour orange pork---seafood noodle soup, fried rice, and black bean noodles.

For example, when you’re co-dependent on your partner you resent them, but when you leave your partner, you feel anxious and bereft.

I want to go up to that person and ask her how she did it! But the you of the present is looking at your life and past as if you’re a failure. When in truth, from the perspective of a younger you, you’re the very picture of success.

The important thing here isn’t whether you are being loved, it’s how you will accept the love that comes your way.

I was told that my accumulated mistakes will create a stronger sense of self, that I was doing just fine, that I was perfectly capable of looking at the other side of the coin, but the coin just happens to be a little heavy, that’s all.

We don’t live in some caste system, no one has the right to select anyone for anything. It’s all give and take.

If we have a habit of judging people from a simplistic perspective, that perspective will eventually turn against ourselves.

I don’t know why an individual has to be treated as less-than and strive to fit society’s standards when it’s the people who denigrate others who are the real problem.

That’s how it is with the people I love. I love the light in their eyes, their passion and their courage in leaping into love. I’ve never loved anyone with half of my heart thinking, this is enough for me.

My hypocrisy disgusts me. But nothing comes from scolding myself or hating myself for these feelings. I simply must accept that I have room for improvement, and consider these moments as constant opportunities for self-reflection, to feel shame and joy at having learned something new and to keep inching towards change.

I am unable to understand those who do love me in spite of it all, and so I test them. ‘You love me even when I do this? Or this? Or this?’ Even when the other person forgives me, I am unable to understand their forgiveness, and when they give up on me, I torture and console myself with the ‘fact’ that no one could ever love me. That

revealing my darkness is just as natural a thing to do as revealing my light.

To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavour for any one person.

You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.

If it doesn’t make you feel good, don’t go out of your way to do it.

you have to realise that everyone reacts differently. You need to accept that different people will have different responses to the same conversation.

I’d like you not to give too much credit to what people say about you.

The moment you set out to be more empathic is the moment it becomes a chore. That would result in your empathy decreasing, if anything.

You’re blaming your circumstances instead of your personality

there’s really no end to worrying once you set your mind to it.

But that idealised version of yourself is, in the end, only an ideal. It’s not who you actually are.

you’ve often behaved not how you wanted to, but rather out of a sense of obligation, or according to standards you’d invented.

If you have unrealistically high standards, you will forever be creating reasons to see yourself as inadequate,

You have to make an effort to know yourself. You can’t not make that effort and keep thinking, Why am I like this?

But the moment you think to yourself, Well, this is the way I am, and what can you do about it, you’ll feel much freer.

you can enjoy the freedom of your own thoughts. Instead of thinking, I must not have these thoughts.

to expect someone to always be a certain way or consistently do a certain thing can be a huge burden on them.

Light and darkness are part of the same thing. Happiness and unhappiness alternate throughout life, as in a dance. So as long as I keep going and don't give up, surely I will keep having moments of tears and laughter.

Words and behaviours are very different, and while hiding words is easy, hiding the behaviour that reaches out from one's subconscious is impossible.

I am learning how to accept life as it is. Accepting your burdens and putting them down isn't an occasional posture; it's something you need to practise for the rest of your life.

Maybe complete empathy is impossible, but we can certainly keep trying. I believe that trying in the face of this knowledge is the most worthwhile thing we can do.

What matters isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires.

I feel too young to have seen the life and death of a living sentient being. All beginnings and endings feel so heavy to me. I am too much of a worrier to focus on the happiness of the moment.

Ölümüne depresif değildim ama mutlu da değildim, bu iki duygu arasında bir yerde süzülüyordum.

Even in my most unbearably depressed moments I could be laughing at a friend's joke but still feel an emptiness in my heart, and then feel an emptiness in my stomach, which would make me go out to eat some tteokbokki - what was wrong with me? I wasn't deathly depressed, but I wasn't happy either, floating instead in some feeling between the two. I suffered more because I had no idea that these contradictory feelings could and did coexist in many people.

dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder?

You’ve got to stop falling into the binary trap of thinking you’re either all-ordinary or all-special. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are not the only ways we think in black and white.

I love and cherish your story. And I am your friend.

I wonder about others like me, who seem totally fine on the outside but are rotting on the inside,

That person has changed’ are completely useless in some cases; it finally occurred to me that to expect someone to always be a certain way or consistently do a certain thing can be a huge burden on them.

Maybe your ‘baggage’ is like an old bag, too. You toss it around any which way, not caring how worn it gets or where it lands, and no one notices. You can’t afford a new bag so you carefully and painstakingly hold it so the rough patches don’t show.

To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavour for any one person. You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.

Mutlu olmak istiyorsanız, şu gerçeklerden korkmalı ve onlarla yüzleşmelisiniz: İlk gerçek, daima mutsuz olduğumuz ve üzüntümüzün, acı çekmemizin ve korkmamızın bir sebebi olduğudur. İkinci gerçek de bu duyguların hiçbirini kendimizden tamamen uzaklaştıramayacağımızdır." Une Parfaite Journée Parfaite, Martin Page.

Hep aşırı uçlarda düşünüyorum. Siyah beyaz.

Perhaps it was a given that I would end up depressed as an adult. But even when I changed all the parts of my life that I had wanted to change – my weight, education, partner, friends – I was still depressed. I didn’t always feel that way, but I would go in and out of a funk that was as inevitable as bad weather. I might go to bed happy and wake up sad and sullen.

When you get good results, your worth is realised and you relax, but that satisfaction doesn’t last long – that’s the problem. It’s like you’re running inside a hamster wheel. You try to get out of your depression through your efforts but fail, and this continuing cycle of trying and failing feeds back into the original depression.

but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life.

You mustn’t let your hobby become stressful. But I hope if you don’t do it isn’t out of fear.

Even if I were fat or ugly, I want to acknowledge and love myself. But society teaches us to judge each other’s weight, and my father and older sister would praise me whenever I happened to lose a few pounds. I don’t think I look healthier or feel better when I’m thinner, but I do think I have more confidence.

I only write when the weather, my body or my mind is dark. I want to write well while thinking well. I hate being full of heaviness and darkness and excess. So here’s to thinking more positively!

The thing is, the people whose faces you like are probably beautiful, and the faces you dont like can be beautiful, too.

Meaningful Even in a Small Way ‘These were all behaviours you had no awareness of until recently, and to make the realisation that you always make the same choices is, in itself, proof you’re getting better.

I hope you learn to look at a person as a whole before judging them. And to look upon yourself as a whole individual as well.

In books, we're always being told that we have to love ourselves if we want to love others, that if we denigrate ourselves, others will denigrate us as well. I tended to think that was nonsense. I've hated myself for such a long time. But there have always been people who love me. And I don't love myself, but I do love others.

hiçbir şey yapmadan öylece oturup kendi hayal kırıklığım içinde pişiyorum. o kadar uzun süredir aşırı düşüncelere sahibim ki aksini unutuyorum. kendinizi sevmediğiniz takdirde sevgi anlayışınız çarpık olabilir. çünkü gördüğünüz sevgiden şüphe duymaya başlarsınız. örneğin dış görünüşünü beğenmiyorsanız ama biri size iltifat ediyorsa o zaman, "bunu bana neden söylüyor? kötü bir niyeti mi var?" diye düşünebilirsiniz. öte yandan dış görünüşünüzle bir sorununuz yoksa, iltifatı olduğu gibi kabul edebilirsiniz. burada önemli olan sevilip sevilmediğiniz değil, size gösterilen sevgiyi nasıl karşıladığınızdır. bence her şeyin sebebini kendinizde aramanıza gerek yok. belki de sadece kötü bir gün geçiriyordunuz. sevmek ve sevilmek istiyorum. kendi canımı yakmayacağım bir yol bulmak istiyorum. işlerin kötüden çok daha iyi olduğunu söyleyebileceğim bir hayat istiyorum. başarısız olmaya devam etmek ve yeni, daha iyi yollar keşfetmek istiyorum. içimdeki duygu gelgitini, hayatın ritmi olarak görüp onun keyfini çıkarmak istiyorum. devasa karanlığın içinde yürüyüp uzun süre altında durabileceğim bir parça gün ışığını bulabilen türden biri olmak istiyorum. bir gün olacağım da.

And the texture I enjoy more of the two is definitely one of love and sensibility.

I want to focus on the parts that are changing, and to keep hoping. Hoping there will come a day when we can all feel good about ourselves regardless of modifiers.