184 Quotes by Min Jin Lee

Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know. You’re becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life – but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman – just ourselves.

A snake that sheds its skin is still a snake.

Learn everything. Fill your mind with knowledge – it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.” Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.

The Lord forgives, but the world does not forgive.

Life makes you pay... everybody pays something.

It wasn’t uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort – the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn’t work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn’t be laundered by good results.

But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.

We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.

It’s possible that the college prizes misled me to believe that I could publish a novel immediately after quitting the law. However, the more I studied fiction, the more I realized that writing novels required rigorous discipline and mastery, no different than the study of engineering or classical sculpture. I wanted to get formal training.