Paul Yoon > Quotes

“He thought of these yers as another life within the one he had. As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone. He did not understand how a life could vanish. How that was even possible. How it could close in an instant before you even reach inside one last time, touch someone's hand one last time. How there would come a day when no one would wonder about the life he had before this one.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“This momentary bridge. The wonder of a shared memory, returned. Of a place once theirs and a life that had already been lived.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“It was as though someone, somewhere, were dreaming this and he had crossed into it without permission. Everything both familiar and foreign.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“It occurred to her, watching him move through the crowd, that time, in some ways, had nothing to do with how you thought of someone. And she did not know how that was possible because time was, she thought, how you defined yourself. It was what made you and what finished you as well.”
― Paul Yoon, Once the Shore

“He thought of these years as another life within the one he had. As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“One night, returning to the house, he went into his father’s shed. He stared at the unsold pots and the vases on the shelves, at their shapes and their designs, the illustrations of landscapes. He wondered what would become of them. He reached for one, then hesitated. He thought of them staying here, untouched, through the seasons and the years. He thought of the ones people had purchased, scattered throughout the country. He imagined that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father’s hands. That they contained the heat of a kiln and a home that no longer existed. He wondered whether he would be able to recognize them if he saw them again.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“We have this life, and then we become something else. Wouldn't you agree? You have had this life but soon, tomorrow, you will become someone else, with someone else. You mustn't be afraid of change like that. You must embrace it and be stronger for it.”
― Paul Yoon, The Hive and the Honey: Stories

“He was told to walk the road as the soldiers took bets on whether he would step on a bomb, grew bored when nothing happened, and shot him.”
― Paul Yoon, Run Me to Earth

“And yet he found comfort in the absence of telling.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“But I'm not sure what to do now, now that I'm here. I'm not sure what to do. I'm here, and yet nothing familiar has come to me, as though I'm still far away, still moving. Like I haven't yet arrived. Or like I've come here for the first time, smelling and seeing things here for the first time. Everything new and unknown.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“For a moment, he was still that man, a boy, in that country, in that harbor, with his back to the years that had happened and unsure of whether those years would follow him into the sea.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“Heading up into the mountains, I wondered if there might come a time when I would lose the memory of that day – the clarity and the stillness of it – and how I would feel about that. How I would feel if one day I stopped carrying certain things in my head, so many of the things I kept returning to in my head…and whether this meant I had managed to go far enough away, into a time when all of this was old. Which would also mean a time when I was old, older.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“calm.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“Standing there, in his father’s shed, he knew that there had been, between them, affection and even tenderness. That his father had never been unkind. That in their silences there had been a form of love. But he had never known him, had never been close to him in the way he witnessed other sons and their fathers.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“As time went on, the more hurt she was, the more she wanted to hurt.

And the blue in her eyes grew less blue, and I could never explain that.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“One time the scent of the old man appeared in the air: some combination of tobacco and citrus and soap. It was fleeting yet he was certain he had smelled it, but he did not know where it had come from, whether it had been someone at the window or from the shop itself, as though a part of the man remained in the tables, in the air of the boxes, in the fabrics themselves.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“He imagined the tailor as a young man and his journey here, crossing an ocean on a slow-moving ship as he himself did. He wondered whether Kiyoshi had been wearing a uniform. Whether there had been a family and where they were. What the man had fled from, if he had fled at all. What the man had let go of and whether it was possible to regain anything, to search and find it once more. Whether there was someone far from here who remembered him.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“During the war, I always felt relief when I crossed paths with a living cat. It was because they appeared in unexpected placed. High up in a tree or on the slope of a roof. Balancing themselves on a fence post. In the arms of a corpse in a ditch. I loved the way the brought me out of the landscape, briefly, into a new place--a new level to see the world we were traversing.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“Whats a volcanao? he said.
His ears moved as I explained it as best as I knew. I said it was like a door holding in what was inside the earth. And sometimes that door broke open, and the earth erupted and there was fire.
You mean war? the old dog said. You're named after war?
I stayed quiet. I licked my paw. No one had ever said that about my name before.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“It was summer here and he wondered if there existed a different season for every corner of this world in this moment and the moments to come. Whether if you traveled fast and far enough you could witness a year passing in a single journey.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“Yeah, we sort of made a mess of things here, didn't we.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“But as he grew older he thought less of it, grew accustomed to the days lived. Each day he climbed the hill, as he used to, and helped build the factory. He visited the town. The seasons passed. Then the years. His father a curtained room. His mother, too. This blank space in his life that he was unable to paint.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“He did not understand how a life could vanish. How that was even possible. How it could close in an instant before you could reach inside one last time, touch someone’s hand one last time. How there would come a day when no one would wonder about the life he had before this one.”
― Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

“Harry wasn't a superstitious man, or for that matter a spiritual one, but with them gone, he believed in grief, in profound, dumbstruck grief. That slow, heavy, animal feeling was like a coat he could never take off. It altered the day's colors, the sounds. Every moment reminded him of his father. A woman cradling a plant in a pot. A voice from the street corner. Some news reports about North Korea.”
― Paul Yoon, The Hive and the Honey: Stories

“I thought about Fuji when she was that young and frightened and about how I had once been that young and frightened, too. I thought about how over the years she was no longer frightened, but that some days she charged and fought like she was trying to get back to time when she was frightened.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna