Kyung-Sook Shin > Quotes

“You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Either a mother and daughter know each other very well or they are strangers.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“إن معظم الاشياء في العالم لا تأتي غير متوقعة إن فكر المرء فيها بعناية. فحتى الأشياء التي قد يظنها غير اعتيادية، هي في الواقع أشياء كان المقرر لها أن تحدث. وإن صادف المرء أحداثا غير اعتيادية،فهذا يعني غالبا انه لا يفكر في الأمور مليا.”
― كيونغ سوك شين, أرجوك اعتنِ بأمي

“All I wanted was for you to be free from everything. And with that freedom, you often showed me another world, so I wanted you to be even freer. I wanted you to be so free that you would live your life for other people.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Mom's eyes held yours for a moment. 'I don't like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.' Mom's expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, 'If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Even though nobody knew that you were in my life, you were the person who brought a raft at every rapid current and helped me cross that water safely. I was happy that you were there. I came to tell you I was able to travel through my life because I could come to you when I was anxious, not when I was happy.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“إن صمت الموتى يجعل الباقين على قيد الحياة يصابون بالجنون.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“You're paved in my heart like an old road. Like the pebbles in a pebble field, dirt in dirt, dust in dust, cobwebs in cobwebs.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“How can you live without trusting people? There are more people who are good than people who are bad!”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom. Until you saw her running to your uncle like that, it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers, and this realization led to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood. From then on, you sometimes thought of Mom as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a newlywed, as a mother who had just given birth to you.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“You should only ask someone if they love you if you love them, regardless of what the answer might be.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“Growing old does not make us any better at loving one another or understanding the meaning of life or death. Nor does knowledge come with the passage of time.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“If only we could have met each other sooner. We had led such poor and fragile lives, each alone.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“إن تلك الأم هي الشخص الذي تلجأين إليه هندما يتملكك اليأس حيال شيء ما في هذه المدينه.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“If there were no sea between you and me...there wouldn't be this painful goodbye”
― Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“بعد أن اختفت، أصبحت حاضرة في حياتكم، و كأنكم تستطيعون مد أيديكم إليها و لمسها”
― Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Time is always bearing down on us; nevertheless, had I understood in my youth that we can never relive the same moment twice, things might have turned out differently. Had I understood that, I would never have said goodbye to someone, and someone else might still be alive. If only I had known that the moment you think everything has ended, something new is beginning.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“Each time I thought about him, the idea that I would never be able to reach him spread through my mind like a shadow.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“You left this house whenever you wanted to, and came back at your whim, and you never once thought that your wife would be the one to leave.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“So, I revealed secrets I did not want known in order to feel closer to someone. Oh, the loss I felt when I found the secrets I had held dear, that were so difficult to say out loud, that I had kept to myself, were being spread around the next day as if they were nothing! I think that was the moment I realized that pouring your heart out to someone might not bring you closer but in fact make you poorer instead.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

“Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Even though Mom’s missing, summer will come and fall will come again and winter will come, like this. And I’ll be living in a world without Mom.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“I had no way of knowing where it began or where it ended. Only that it flowed without restraint.”
― Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There