Angie Kim > Quotes

“We all have thoughts that shame us.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“Tragedies don't inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn't get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy.”
― Angie Kim

“No one measured the number of hours spent holding your baby in the first year of life versus the remaining years, the dramatic dissipation of intimacy- the sensual familiarity of nursing, holding, comforting- as children pass from infancy and toodlerhood to the teens. You lived in the same house, but the intimacy was gone, replaced by aloofness, with splashes of annoyance. Like an addiction, you could go for years without it, but you never forgot it, never stopped missing it, and when you got a dab of it, like now, you craved it more and wanted to gorge on it.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“There's something, though, about the sounds that other people make. Not talking, necessarily. Just the sounds of living - creaking upstairs, humming a tune, watching TV, clanging the dishes - that blot away your loneliness. You miss them when they're gone. Their absence - the total silence - becomes palpable.”
― Angie Kim

“But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together - one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad - every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness - resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”
― Angie Kim

“It was exhausting and it took fifteen minutes. Fifteen for a pit stop that should take two! She knew she shouldn't whine; there were so many "bigger" things to deal with. But it was these everyday indignities, these small chunks of lost minutes, that got her the most, made her think how "normal" parents had no idea how good they had it. Oh, sure - moms of infants got a taste of this, but anything was bearable when it was temporary; try doing it day after day, knowing you'd do this until you died, that you'd be fricking squatting in a van peeing into a jar when you were eighty, driving around your fifty-year-old invalid daughter to God knows what therapies they'd have by then, worrying who'd take over when you died.”
― Angie Kim

“Happiness is not absolute. It's relative-your today compared to your yesterday(baseline) + your vision for tomorrow (expectations).
"Happiness Falls”
― Angie Kim

“I wish more moms would talk like this. We need to tell each other the ugly stuff, the stuff we're ashamed of.”
― Angie Kim

“...sometimes, when you were guilty of something, others' pretense that you weren't responsible was the unbearable part. It was infantilizing, demeaning.”
― Angie Kim

“Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together - one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad - every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness - resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“We all have thoughts that shame us...but if that were to actually happen, that'd be unbearable”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“PTSD they called it - Americans has such a penchant for reducing phrases to acronyms; saving seconds was so important to them”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“Harmonee used to say that shame is the most powerful and long-lasting emotion we have, that scanning through her seventy-plus years of memories, the moments that felt unbearably intense at the time - teenage first love, childbirth, the deaths of loved ones - have mellowed over the years, but remembering the moments she's ashamed of, even from childhood, she still feels the rise of heat, the flush on her face, its intensity not only undiminished but possibly even growing over time.”
― Angie Kim

“Anyway, my point is, we all have our moments. But they're just moments, and they pass. At the end of the day, you love Rosa, I love Henry, and we've both sacrificed everything and we'd do anything for them. So if a tiny part of us has these thoughts a tiny part of the time, thoughts we shut out as soon as they creep in, is that so bad? Isn't that just human?”
― Angie Kim

“Autism isn't a defect, just a different way of being.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“The main and frustration this boy must have endured his whole life. having thoughts and words he desperately wants to express but couldn't, fearing this might continue for the rest of his life.

Whether you're an immigrant, you stutter, or have autism, aphasia/dyspraxia, Angelman syndrome---there are so many reasons why you might have trouble speaking, unrelated to the quality of your thoughts.

...our society's deeply ingrained assumption that oral fluency is equivalent to intelligence. Just because you can't speak doesn't mean you can't think or understand.”
― Angie Kim

“In the distance, beyond the stretch of burned, dead dirt, beyond the carcass of the submarine now slowly moving away, a patch of wildflowers in yellow and blue stood, and looking at it, she felt her despair displaced by something simultaneously heavier and lighter. Han. There was no English equivalent, no translation. It was an overwhelming sorrow and regret, a grief and yearning so deep it pervades your soul - buy with a sprinkling of resilience, of hope.”
― Angie Kim

“My twin brother, John, keeps trying to make me feel better, too, saying we couldn't have known something was wrong because it was such a typical morning, which is an asinine thing to say because why would you assume things can't go wrong simply because they haven't yet? Life isn't geometry; terrible, life-changing moments don't happen predictably, at the bottom of a linear slope. Tragedies and accidents are tragic and accidental precisely because of their unexpectedness.”
― Angie Kim

“Be yourself everyone else is already taken”
― Angie kim

“Things many people consider fundamental to the core of a human existence-the ability to will your face to match and express your feelings, to expect your body to obey your commands, to use words to communicate-these are things this infinitesimal partial defect in 0.00000003% of Eugene's genes has ripped away from him.”
― Angie Kim

“I am here. Such a simple declaration of existence that shouldn't be necessary for any human being, so what does it mean that this whole group of people feels the need to say it so often?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“There's this moment right when you wake up after something horrible has happened, and everything seems normal. A halfway point between sleep and awake, where both worlds seem equally plausible. You're no longer in the dream world, but your memory clings....”
― Angie Kim

“Just because you can't speak doesn't mean you can't speak or understand.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Just because you can't speak doesn't mean you can't think or understand.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Miracle Creek didn't look like a place where miracles took place, unless you counted the miracle of people living there for years without going insane from bordem.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“In music the longer a dissonant chord is sustained, the greater the emotional satisfaction when it resolves. When a discordant sound stretches, going on a little too long, it sounds wrong. And you know it will resolve soon—it has to. But impatience and anticipation build, and while those notes are sustained in the vibrations of your eardrums, the consonant chord plays. The promise of that liminal state when both things exist, the dissonance and consonance, colliding into an exquisite messiness until the dissonant notes fully dissipate into harmony.”
― Angie Kim

“There are moments when something we've idealized all our lives changes and becomes something less. Not by a noticeable amount, just an infinitesimal disappointment. But it's like going from 100 percent to 99.9 percent - imperceptible quantitatively, but dramatically different qualitatively, from flawless to flawed.”
― Angie Kim

“Pak Yoo was a different person in English than in Korean. In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity. Before moving to America, he'd prepared himself for the difficulties he knew he'd experience: the logical awkwardness of translating his thoughts before speaking, the intellectual taxation of figuring out words from context, the physical challenge of shaping his tongue into unfamiliar positions to make sounds that didn't exist in Korean. But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech and, like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself. In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.”
― Angie Kim

“But it was like multiple night feedings with newborns--yes, it was horrible, and yes, you prayed for it to stop, but not really. Because that was a sign of normalcy, and as bad as it could get, normalcy was a beautiful thing to those who lost it.”
― Angie Kim

“There's something, though, about the sounds that other people make. Not talking, necessarily. Just their sounds of living - creaking upstairs, humming a tune, watching TV, clanging dishes - that blot away your loneliness. You miss them when they're gone. Their absence - the total silence - becomes palpable.”
― Angie Kim