56 Quotes by Kyung-Sook Shin

Time is always bearing down on us; nevertheless, had I understood in my youth that we can never relive the same moment twice, things might have turned out differently. Had I understood that, I would never have said goodbye to someone, and someone else might still be alive. If only I had known that the moment you think everything has ended, something new is beginning.

We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death.

If I opened my mouth to say a single word, all of the other expired words would have followed and spilled to the ground, as if the string that held them together had snapped.

If there were no sea between you and me... there wouldn’t be this painful goodbye.

Taking his hand and letting it go was my way of saying goodbye.

You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again. It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual – if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.

Maybe if we hug a hundred strangers, he said, something will change.

Back then, he and I were always waiting for each other.