Hwang Sok-yong > Quotes

“Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a dream.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, The Old Garden

“A trăi înseamnă a aştepta şi a îndura timpul.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng

“People hated and killed each other back then. Now even those who survived are dying, leaving this world one by one. Unless we find a way to forgive one another, none of us will ever be able to see each other again. (2007: 88)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“Sufletul omului e ca mâncarea. Cu timpul, se acreşte.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng

“The scene [Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, The Old Garden

“Women are walking around on the streets. From her calf and the hem of her skirt to her hip, from her hair to the high heels on her feet, a young woman is freedom. Especially when you look at her from afar.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, The Old Garden

“They are like the handful of belongings saved from a burnt-down house. There should be a continuous challenge to authority for change and reform, and groups of ordinary people should form an alliance to reclaim what was taken by the state inch by inch, like a children's game, and enlarge the territory to the level of practical equality.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, The Old Garden

“I felt like my body was slowly disappearing. First my arms and legs blurred at the edges and vanished, leaving only my trunk, then that, too, started to disappear from the bottom up. I stared at the reflection of my upper half floating in the window, transposed over the city lights, like a photo taken from overlapping negatives. Who are you? asked the man in the glass.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, At Dusk

“They say we’re here because of desire. In our desire to live better than others, we are cruel to each other.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari

“[A]ll business for us men on earth is based on material things -- so we've just got to work hard and share the fruits of our labors with one another.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“I realized that life means waiting, enduring the passage of time. Nothing ever quite meets our expectations, yet as long as we are alive, time flows on, and everything eventually comes to pass.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari

“They say God is one and the same everywhere, in all countries. Well, I know everything, everything from the very beginning. Those big noses just came here with their books and spread them all over the place. Our ancestors, the founding father of our race, was Tangun. He came down from the heavens a long, long time ago. They say that's not so. They say that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. People should worship their own ancestors properly if they want to be proper human beings. Our country has gone to the dogs because so many have started worshiping someone else's God. (2007: 40)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“But I still believe that, no matter what kind of oppression or difficulty ensues, the social function of the artist must begin from a critical point of view. The relationship between the government and the arts must be that the former supports, but does not control, the latter. A society where artists have lost their faculty of criticism and submit unconditionally to power is well on its way to losing its democracy.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Prisoner: A Memoir

“Later, when I travelled to other parts of the world and saw numerous cities and glittering lights and the vitality of those crowds of people, I was struck with disappointment and disgust at how they had all abandoned us and looked the other way.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari

“There is an old saying that goes 'Start by plucking a hair, end by killing a man'. It is also said, 'Two hands must meet to make a sound'. The atrocities that happened here weren't carried out by strangers - it was us, the people who'd once lived together harmoniously in the same village."
"They say it was the superstitious freaks who did it."
"No, it was Satan who did it."
"Come now, what sort of a ghost is that?"
Ryu Yosop replied, "It is the black thing that lives in the heart of every man.”
― Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, The Guest

“The purpose of life's good and bad is to teach us to be better people, which is why you have to overcome this and appreciate the beauty of life. That's what God wants from us.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari

“I sympathised with those who were fighting social injustices, but at the same time, by having the fortitude to just buckle down and get through it, I was able to forgive myself for not getting involved. Over time, this turned into a kind of habitual resignation, and it became second nature for me to regard everything around me with an air of cool indifference. I thought this meant I was mature. During the 1980s, when most people were finally getting a breather from the grinding poverty of before, this type of resignation became commonplace, and all of those small wounds calloused over.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, At Dusk

“What kind of soldier carries music instead of guns?”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“[R]egardless of one's cause, one should always treat those close to him as well as humanly possible.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“Back then, rice was in short supply, and the government was waging a campaign to encourage people to eat more flour and mixed grains. At school, our lunchboxes were inspected daily, and anyone caught bringing white rice had their palms strapped. Flour, donated as food aid by the United States and stamped on each sack with a picture of a handshake, was distributed by the neighbourhood office and eventually found its way into the marketplace. Lunch in every home consisted of sujebi, knife-cut noodles, or banquet noodles — the extra-thin soup noodles that were extruded by machine and so insubstantial that you’d barely even chewed them before they were slipping down your throat. They were called banquet noodles because we used to eat them only on special days, but they were ubiquitous in our neighbourhood since you could prepare them many different ways, including in soup or tossed in a spicy sauce.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, At Dusk

“As it turns out, the atrocities we suffered were committed by none other than ourselves, and the inner sense of guilt and fear sparked by this incident helped form the roots of the frantic hatred that thrives to this day. (2007: 9)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“becoming a grown-up did not mean good things were waiting for you.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Familiar Things

“We stopped telling our stories in detail, but whenever the subject of our home countries came up, it always seemed to end in fighting and starvation and disease and brutal, fearful generals seizing power. There were still so many people dying in every corner of the world, and people crossing endless borders in search of food, just so they could live without the constant threat of death.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari

“He’s my hyung,’ Baldspot said.
‘I didn’t know you had an older brother.’
‘He fell off a garbage truck!’ he said with a giggle.
‘Well now, what can’t you get from a garbage truck these days?’ the woman chuckled.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Familiar Things

“Plus. the feeling of sudden adulthood that came with getting drunk wasn't bad either.”
― Hwang Sok-yong, Familiar Things

“I can't say a thing. What is there to say? I have given birth to a son! What more can I possibly hope for? I hear his footsteps crossing the front yard and gradually fading away, off into the distance. As the silence grows, I suddenly realize that he"s gone. He's gone to someplace far away, and he's never coming back.(2007: 153)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“... but why does our family only ever side with the losers and never the winners?

What, you don’t like siding with the weaker folk?

Of course not. All we do is get hurt!

The wrinkles around his grandmother’s eyes had grown even deeper as she smiled widely and said, ‘It always looks like you’re losing at first, but in the end, the weak are destined to win. It’s just frustrating that it takes so long, is all.’

Then she added, ‘If you live long enough, you figure this all out. Everyone else knows it, too. They just don’t like to show it.”
― Hwang Sok-yong

“we left our home forty years ago. Despite the unhappy events we faced there, we left because our faith allowed it, because our belief in the Lord taught us that we would find a new place, a place to build a heaven on earth. War was waged in our home as we left. Many, many innocents dies. To live, people killed and were killed. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds his people of the promise made to their ancestors regarding the land of Canaan. He delivers the law, teaching them how to win a life of victory in the land of promise. They said, Jehovah, let all the enemies of the Lord face this same end. Do not pity them or offer them promises, only annihilate them all. And yet, Jesus taught love and peace. I say again - those left behind in our hometown had souls, just as we do. It is we who must repent first. (2007: 17)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“Back then, I think, both sides were just very young. They needed to grow up enough to realize that thing get quite complicated in the business of living, that a lot of things require mutual understanding and compromise. I mean, when you get right down to it, all business for us men on earth is based on material things - so we've just got to work hard and share the fruits of our labors with one another. Only when that is done righteously can we render our faith honorably to God. Within a generation of adopting a school of thought in the name of New Learning, be it Christianity or socialism, we all became such ardent followers that we forgot the way of life we'd led for so long. (2007: 163)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest

“Their words flitted past, like short sentences typed out on a keyboard, typing away Yosop's past and future. They all said "American troops," but Yosop knew for a fact that the troops had simply been passing through. They were never stationed in Sinchon; they were in a rush to get further north. Both Yosop and his brother Yohan knew for a fact that during those forty-five days, before the arrival of the U.S. troops and after their departure, most of the military strength in the area had consisted of the security forces and the Youth Corps - all Korean. (2007: 99)”
― Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest