Choi Eunyoung > Quotes

“Those were the days when I believed my life would turn out special. I secretly sneered at cowards who compromised with reality. But this silly arrogance of mine is the reason why I am nothing now.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“I wish you the blessing of oblivion, and that you will find the strength to exist moment by moment.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“Time passes, people leave, we become alone again. If we don't accept that fact, memory erodes the present and exhausts the mind until it ages us and ails us.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“had suffered pain beyond her imagination. Some people break up after a big fight, but there are also people who drift incrementally apart until they can’t face each other anymore. The latter stay longer in your memory.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile

“Memory is a talent. You were born with it,” my grandma told me when I was young. “But it’s a painful one. So, try to make yourself a little less sensitive. Be extra cautious with happy memories, my dear. Happy memories seem like jewels when in fact they’re burning charcoal. You’ll hurt yourself if you hold on to them, so let go and dust off your hands. Child, they are no gift.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile

“You had to be a go‑getter in your twenties more than any other time, where being a go‑getter meant building a safe career as quickly as possible or die trying.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile

“I couldn’t stand her love, which did not reject even the ugliest of my faces. I couldn’t stand it because I had been afraid of being loved from the beginning.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“I used to think they were grandfather clocks that had stopped ticking, that gathered dust and faded in colour each year. Like people who had neither a goal nor the will to change, whose lives had come to a grinding halt.”
― Eun-young Choi, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“People locked their hearts at some point in their lives, as if everyone had agreed to do so. Then they made acquaintances outside those locks, with people who would never hurt them or be hurt by them, formed savings groups among themselves, vacationed with other married couples, or went hiking together. Telling each other that they never wanted to go back to being twenty. Saying they were pretty clueless back then, weren’t they?”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“I am his religion, his whole world. Every time I remember that I want to die.”
― Eun-young Choi, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“I was angry at everything in the world, including myself. When the anger subsided, my body and mind would crumble into ashes. I went through this process again and again. They say nineteen, twenty, twenty-one are beautiful years. All I remember about those years is wishing day after day to die.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“If you couldn't share someone's pain,, if you didn't have the guts to survive a difficult stretch with them, it was better to choose heartlessness over half-hearted affection.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“art in general, only revealed its true face to hardworking geniuses, not hardworking mediocrities.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“People say things like “Out of sight, out of mind” or “Love or even hate-love grows only when you meet often enough,” but they didn’t apply to Shoko. For her to call someone a friend, they had to be a safe distance away, out of sight and out of earshot, with absolutely zero chance of ever intruding on her life.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“We should distinguish love from affection.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“Shoko once told me that standing on the shore made her feel like she was standing on the outskirts of the world. As if she'd been pushed away from the center, away from people, until she reached the edge of the sea that was itself pushed away from the great ocean.”
― Choi Eunyoung

“We didn’t know how to be horrible to each other. But looking back, not even knowing how to be horrible to each other—that unawareness—was the most horrible part.We had been politely covering each other’s eyes. In the end, I took my hand off his eyes first, and we split up cleanly. That farewell proved there was no love left between us because the last moment of lovers was never supposed to be so clean. We had simply moved from one dot to
another.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“Someone who welcomed and savored life, not someone who endured it.”
― Choi Eunyoung

“I don’t care how badly you treat me. There’s no way in the world I could hate you. I’m fine meeting like this, I just want to stay in the same space as you. When I think about how I won’t see you here in a week, I tear up even while I walk.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“Writing became easily to me on a good day and I’d think I could actually pull this off, only to throw it away the next day, seized by the fear that I would never be able to write again.”
― Choi Eun-young, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“I was the most hurt, the most agonized person in the world, so my eyes saw nothing but my own pain.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“I was watching someone who'd had a piece of her mind shattered and found myself basking in an odd sense, of superiority.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“(…) That’s how you become an adult. No one thought the examine the bruises inside her. The incident had nothing to do with her, in other people’s lives, and not one of them suspected it had damaged her.”
― Choi Eunyoung

“Film, art in general, only revealed it’s true face to hardworking geniuses, not hardworking mediocrities.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“The fact that I could no longer see him became clearer by the minute. Yet, the clearer it became, the less it felt like fact.”
― Choi Eunyoung

“In Hell or in Heaven, the idea of eternity was suffocating.”
― Choi Eun-young, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“The attitudes they adopted out of consideration for each other slowly drove them apart, and the bond they had forged during the time they lived together could no longer sustain their relationship.”
― Choi Eunyoung, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“While distancing myself from the few people who loved me, I thought my films would portray some deep layer of the human psyche. Little did I know then how lonely this arrogance of mine made them feel.”
― Choi Eun-young, Shoko's Smile

“He was born in an era that scorned the expression of feelings, calling it unmanly. Despite such censorship, signs of love had at times slipped out of him.”
― Choi Eun-young, Shoko's Smile: Stories

“Mom was a person who repressed and repressed her grief until she no longer knew how to grieve. A person who lost a father that she had lived with her whole life yet couldn’t even let loose a tear without fear, who didn’t know how to weep and retch and wash away the pain, who suffered only through invisible symptoms like headaches and cold hands and feet.”
― Choi Eun-young, Shoko's Smile: Stories