Hye-Young Pyun > Quotes

“To be human was to be saddled with emptiness.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Oghi looked lovingly on his wife’s shallow vanity. She knew exactly what her goals were, and though she believed in them, she failed at nearly everything she set out to do. Yet she brushed off each failure, hardly any worse for the wear. Then quickly found herself a new role model and extoled their virtues ad nauseam. By doing so, she seemed to come to an understanding of the difference between longing and ambition.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“People don’t end up poor because they’re stupid. They end up poor because the system is fucked.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Law of Lines

“The world's oldest map, the Babylonian Map of the World, had a little circle bored through the center. [...] That dark, narrow hole went as deep as the memory of an age that no one could ever return to. The only way to reach that lost age was through that hole, but the hole itself could never be reached.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“The world’s oldest map, the Babylonian Map of the World, had a little circle bored through the center. Scholars explained that the hole had come from using a compass to trace the two outer rings of the map. Oghi was captivated more by that hole than by the geometric shapes engraved in the clay tablet, and had stared at it for a long time in the darkened exhibit room of the British Museum. That dark, narrow hole went as deep as the memory of an age that no one could ever return to. The only way to reach that lost age was through that hole, but the hole itself could never be reached.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Fear and rumors and viruses shared a similar nature. They bore a tremendous vitality of their own, oblivious to human efforts to stamp them out. They could spread rapidly even while offering no clue to their routes of transmission. And they would burn for a long, long time, like dry grassland, only to vanish in an instant as if doused with water.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“The forties were ripe for sin. And there were two basic reasons: either you had too much, or you didn’t have enough. In other words, the forties were when you found it easy to do bad things out of power, out of anger, or out of feeling left behind.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Danger warnings are more common than actual danger. And yet when danger does finally strike, it does so without warning.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“The forties were a turning point, as it were, the decade of your life in which you either learned to fit in or dropped out completely.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“What he’d really returned to was this noisy, crowded, queuing, waiting, leering world. The world where, as his doctor explained, the only way to survive was through sheer force of will.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“When does evil intent become evil itself? Is it evil simply to imagine and harbor an idea? Does it begin when a thought is put into action? And if that action fails, then did evil never exist to begin with?
If indeed there was no evil, then is it okay to allow bad intentions to make you change your behavior, move to a new place, change your lifestyle? Does that mean that evil thoughts are no worse than a daydream, a mere fantasy? Even fantasies and daydreams can sometimes alter reality.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Law of Lines

“It was difficult and exhausting, but he quickly accepted the fact that life had to go on without her. He’d lost love, and yet the world was not the slightest bit shaken by his loss. The part of his life that had had J in it went away, leaving behind a cavity, a hollow, and still the world was unmoved. Nothing would ever fill in that empty space. But Oghi’s world would keep on spinning regardless.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“And if plundering and pillaging were a means of livelihood, then the only true asset was to own nothing.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“but this came less from a love of humanity than from the fact that they didn’t have to worry about money.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“He had a lingering impression of his own mother as someone who could stand up to his father and talk back to him even while in the grip of dark, pessimistic thoughts. She was at her most magnificent then.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“At the thought that his father’s intestinal walls were in danger of rupturing because he had a piece of shit stuck up his ass, Oghi couldn’t help breaking into random laughter in the middle of his lecture.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“It wasn’t until much later that he realized how much better it would’ve been if he’d let her find her own way out of this grief, slowly, without any empty promises or hasty conclusions.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Stories continued to abound regarding the epidemic, but none of it amounted to anything more than hearsay. No one knew the truth. The more exaggerated the information, the further the rumors spread. But the one comfort was the fact that, still, far more deaths were caused by traffic accidents, chronic disease, and old age than by the virus making its rounds.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Sometimes one’s own success wasn’t enough. Sometimes the failure of someone closer to you was better insurance.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“This was the age of epidemics. You couldn’t be too careful. The fact that the routes of contagion were uncertain meant that you could catch the virus from the air or from a simple brush of skin.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Oghi slowly opened his eyes.

But because his time for crying has come.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“His father was convinced—afraid, in fact—that Oghi was constantly trying to fleece him of his money.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“As, a result of this experience, Kim concluded that friendship had nothing to do with affection, but was a feeling valid only when it reaped benefits for one of the persons involved. He calmly recalled the events and the scars it had inflicted, but the process of remembering did leave him sad and resentful about his long-forgotten past.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, Evening Proposal

“As far as he could tell, that was his wife’s problem. Always wanting to be like someone else. And always giving up before she reached the end.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“The biggest impact the epidemic had on people was not infection and death but rather suspicion of others for fear of exactly that.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Though it wasn’t a very nice method, whenever he felt like he didn’t understand his wife’s family, he simply told himself he was dealing with foreigners.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Epidemics are like rat poison: they strengthen the race by leaving behind only the strongest rats. And just like rats, the human species is not easily exterminated.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Therefore, the forties were the decade that showed you what your life had amounted to thus far. Not only that, they were also the decade in which you could guess at what lay ahead. Would you remain a snob? Or be left a loser?”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole

“Life itself was merely an accumulation of failures, and those failures never made life better.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole