Bae Suah > Quotes

“Ayami was her future self or her past self. And she was both, existing at the same time. In that other world, she was both the chicken and the old woman. That was the secret of night and day existing simultaneously. Ayami discovered this through a single movement, bending down to pick up the pebble. And, remembering this simultaneous existence more vividly than she remembered herself, became unable to remember anything else.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“In life there are wounds that like leprosy slowly eat away at the soul in solitude.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Whatever the intention or aim of the photographer, every photograph is a unique proof of identify, firmly declaring that human beings are ghosts.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“You were born with a knife in your heart.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew a long time ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“You have the eyes of a wolf-girl whose heart has never once been moved. When I press my ear to your chest, I hear only wind and emptiness.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“The body is a passageway - a channel, without which the two of us would not be able to exist in the way we do now, the way I know you and you know me. Without their mirror images, our original forms would not exist.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Even now I think maybe my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“She headed straight to the heart of the darkness, which lacked even a single point of light, and where not even the road beneath her feet could be seen. Like a blind owl, she walked as one with the darkness, undisturbed by it.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“I was only twenty-four, but I was tired.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Being poor or being lonely could be either fortunate or unfortunate, but the truth is that the distinction was meaningless. Whether we were fortunate or not, we were still different, and that’s all there was to it.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“I escaped out of the pitch-black customs area, and in the darkness everybody merged with their bags and suitcases, fusing together like shadows worn thin; they looked like ghosts, passing through a station to the other world. Carrying backpacks and pushing trolleys, as though the weight and bulk of their luggage were a final, definitive record of who they had been in life, like a funeral guestbook.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Whatever the intention or aim of the photographer, Wolfi thought, every photograph is a unique proof of identity, firmly declaring that human beings are ghosts.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“He knew how to accept the tedium without the ennui.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Asleep, I heard the sound of sleeping breath. Of one sleeping breath fumbling for another. They must be tangles with you, my breathing, my sleep, and my dreams. And I wanted to keep dreaming.”
― Bae Suah, North Station

“In the darkness, Ayami's voice insisted overwhelmingly on its own identity. It was a corporeal voice. Just as, in the light of day, people can't help their gaze going to a beautiful woman, in the darkness they pay more attention to the voice. They accept the mystery of seeming to feel the other's gaze on their skin.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Objects, matter itself, were softly disintegrating. All identity became ambiguous, semi-opaque.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“In the past, people were vaguely fearful of photographs, believing the camera's exact reproduction of their own image would steal their souls. Not only did these images survive for much longer than their subjects, they were also endowed with an aura of magic the subjects lacked. A superstition, but one whose traces can still be felt today. People sense that the photograph captures an uncanny moment in the interstices of reality, enhancing reality's eeriness, the root of which is unknown, and fixing that moment in place like a death mask. Photography differs from the art of painting in that capturing or exposing such a moment happens neither at the will of the photographer nor the one who is photographed. What is photographed is a ghost moment, clothed in matter. Photography is the dream of comprehensive meaning. Each object has parts of itself that are invisible. This territory, which neither the photographer nor the subject can govern, constitutes the secret kept by the object. Unrelated to the intention of either photographer or subject, within the magic of photography dwells a still, quiet shock. Try to imagine our house one day when we ourselves are no more. Somewhere in that house is the ghost of us, which will pass alone in front of a blind mirror, revealing our own blurred image.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“To the final darkness of summer before the oncoming dawn, I whisper: “I don’t know anything.” I’m not thrilled by sex, and I’m not moved by love.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“The deeply flushed midsummer sunlight, the strong, clear alcohol filling a dirty glass, a goat tethered with a rope, the enormous sides of a glitteringly white modern building, the solemn melody of the national orchestra, the slender-necked actress who was performing on the stage, the arc of a rainbow which, after a sudden shower, fell to the earth like an arrow from between the clouds, a sheepdog pressed flat under the wheel of a car, a herd of stubborn goats bobbing their heads with profound indifference, blue cloth fluttering in the wind, designating something sacred, a swarthy woman looking down on the street below from a first-floor window, her exposed chest leaning out over the wooden frame, cat-sized rats threading their way around the legs of market stalls, unlit signs and display windows, a sombrely lit butcher’s fridge, each dark red carcass still buttressed with the animal’s skeleton, Banchi’s printing shop, on the ground floor of a temple on the main street in the city centre, there Banchi makes picture postcards featuring his own translations of Indian sutras.”
― Bae Suah, Recitation

“It wasn't so different from 1978, and it wasn't any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998. The people I met in 1988 were no different from those who bumped shoulders with me in the subway in 1978 and whose apathetic eyes met mine outside of a gas station in the middle of the night in 1998. They were family, and they were the unfamiliar middle class, and they were malnourished soldiers. They were each other's toilets and strangers and cliffs and crows and prisons. They were never anything more than who they were. Third person random.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“The prison of time called life.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Sleep drifted about over lukewarm waves, like an anesthetic leaching in through veins, seized by sleep's phantoms... held within sleep, on eye make a simultaneous record of what the other sees. Sleep, the soul's gelatinous component, the made-visible half-form of that which is unsee. Dreams and the embrace of dreams, which always stir up such sluggish, stunned sensations. This things that stimulates my sleep, the respiration and waves of dreams, waves of breath, and waves of water, that chord and note.”
― Bae Suah, North Station

“Tell me what you like, what you want to do.”
“I like having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like watching the rain through a big plate-glass window.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“What about what you want to do in the future?”
“Oh, that? … I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. Wrap me in garbage bags and toss me in the incinerator. I'll turn into dioxin and make my way into your lungs. Stroke my face lightly with a razor blade and suck the blood that comes seeping out. Lap it up like a cat. I want to be covered in blood. I'll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me. The foul scent of burning hair. The heat.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“The weather is very hot, but the sky is blue and the sunlight as sharp as glass. My rented room has a tiny balcony with a nice view. I had thought about lying out there on a towel in my bathing suit with my Walkman in my ears so I could get a tan. All I needed was a pair of sunglasses, oil, and an Agatha Christie novel.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“Silence. The silence inside a prison. The prison of time called life. The prison of class and circumstance. The prison of a code untranslatable into the language of the other. The prison of the flesh. The prison of sweaty hands that can't let go even at the moment of falling. The prison of Cheolsu.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Le comete prendevano fuoco, i gas bruciavano e la cenere scusa impiastricciava la volta celeste. Poi, d'un tratto, la luce si spegneva. Arrivava la notte.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day