Yi Sang > Quotes

“Rather than working and becoming a socially responsible person, rather than listening to my wife's lectures, I wanted to be as idle as the idlest animal on earth. I wanted to cast off as much as possible the meaningless mask of humanity.
I was shy of human society. I was shy of life. Everything was strange and unfamiliar to me.”
― Yi Sang, The Wings

“My face becomes a strip of skin before your face in moonlight my words of praise for you are left unsaid but like a sigh they tickle open a sliding paper door and creep into your hair smelling like camellia fields and transplant seedlings of my sorrow”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“Have you ever seen a stuffed genius? I am happy. At a time like this, even love is pleasant.”
― Yi Sang, The Wings

“A red ink is spilled from an imitation heart. In my dream I am late. I am sentenced to death. I am not the ruler of my dream. It is a great crime to seal up two humans who cannot even shake hands.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“I regretted that I had gone out. I wanted a long, sound sleep, forgetting all this fatigue. I wanted a good, long sleep.”
― Yi Sang

“Tomorrow I will try to enjoy looking at flowers all day. I will rub away my worries with an alcohol-soaked cottonball. Because my dreams have been so trou­bling, I want to dream a dream filled with blossoming flowers, a dream of gravure of primary hues, like a colorful picture book. I would like to compose a refreshing poem, in a 7-point font, for each illustration of my dreams.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“I am also planning a life with a woman. I am a person who has become unfamiliar with the art of love, someone who has caught a glimpse of the very summit of human intellect; in other words, a kind of mentally excitable person. What I mean is that I am planning a life which will accept only a half of this woman - which is in fact the half of everything. I will put only one foot in this life and my two halves will face each other like the two suns and giggle. All the activities of life seem unbearably dull to me and I have renounced them. Good-bye!”
― Yi Sang, The Wings

“Have you ever heard of 'a genius who had been stuffed and preserved'?”
― Yi Sang, The Wings

“Every day I am fated to die. When I awake from the sleep I have been sleeping - how long ago did I begin this sleep that I sleep - a bone-painful life resumes and even though I lie down and cover myself with blankets, I witness the squandering of my youth.”
― Yi Sang, Dying Words

“Can burning organs be distinguished from a drowning cattle shed?”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“This exhaustion will be my fall, but I should not try to fight it. I should overcome it. An out-of-body experience. Shoeless feet shed their legs in the vacant heaven.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“I am absent in my dream. In my mirror my counterfeit does not make an entrance. He craves my loneliness despite my uselessness. I have finally made up my mind to recommend suicide to him. I point him toward the viewless window. It is a win­ dow for suicide. But he instructs me that if I do not kill myself then he cannot kill himself either. The me-inside-the-mirror is almost a phoenix.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“and then do we consider it something that constantly decays, an atom is an atom is an atom is an atom, do physiological effects mutate, an atom is not an atom is not an atom is not an atom, does radiation mean decay, that people live through an eternal eternity means that life is not living nor is it life but it is light and it is it is.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works