90 Quotes by Han Kang

AshesThat winter, she and her younger brother made a six-hour drive to a beach on the south coast. The box holding their mother's powdered bones they enshrined in an ossuary; the small temple nearby with a view of the distant sea would house the woman's soul.

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.

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.

The saying goes that for a wound caused by dog bite to heal you have to eat that same dog, and I did scoop up a mouthful for myself

You haven't woken yourself up, though, merely passed through into another layer. You feel the weight of an enormous glacier bearing down on your body. You wish that you were able to flow beneath it, to become fluid, whether seawater, oil, or lava, and shuck off these rigid, impermeable outlines, which encase you like a coffin. Only that way might you find some form of release.

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.

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

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?

Los militares se amotinaron para hacerse con el poder. Tú has visto como apaleaban y usaban sus bayonetas contra la gente a plena luz del día, ¿no? Como eso no fue suficiente, dispararon sus armas. Así se les ordenó que hicieran. ¿Cómo se puede considerar patria a quienes hicieron semejante cosa?