Baek Se Hee Quotes

“Most people have trouble living a life where their words match their actions. No matter how much they read and try to remember, they always return to their old patterns. I admire those who realise their past mistakes and prove how they’ve changed through their behaviour.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Perhaps this is why we feel discomfort when reading the words of those who are always saying the right things. Because it’s so rare to see someone who walks the talk. The silly thing is, we feel uncomfortable even if we do find someone who walks the talk. We feel smaller next to them, afraid that they will see us for what we are and look down on us. Maybe this is why I feel more comfortable with people who are unpretentious and uncomplicated.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I support feminism and rail against racism, but I find myself shrinking away from a passing foreigner or my body reacts with distaste at the sight of a lesbian who doesn’t put on make-up for valid political reasons. My hypocrisy disgusts me.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“The only way for me to become a better person is to go my way little by little, as tedious as that can be. To delay my judgement, to not force myself, to accept the countless judgements and emotions that pass through me. Criticising myself isn’t going to make me a cleverer person suddenly.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I think I am learning how to accept life as it is. Accepting your burdens and putting them down isn’t an occasional posture; it’s something you need to practise for the rest of your life. To see the pathetic little me as I am, but also to see that the pathetic other person I am relating to is trying their best.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“There were moments where I would refrain from calculating the gains and losses and simply choose what my heart told me to.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“If pure rationality keeps forcing itself into the spaces in between, I shall lose the shine and comfort of my life – which is why I want to be an emotionally bright person, even if it means becoming impoverished in terms of rationality. I want to hold hands and march with those who feel similarly to me. It’s difficult to say whether sense or sensibility is the superior of the two, but they definitely have different textures. And the texture I enjoy more of the two is definitely one of love and sensibility.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“To me, solitude is my one-bedroom apartment, underneath the blanket that fits me perfectly, beneath the sky I find myself staring at while out on a walk, a feeling of alienation that comes over me in the middle of a party.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“It’s no use to hold on to the empty shell of a love that’s past, to try to win back a heart that will never return, or to let your regrets eat you up from the inside...”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“On those days, I read. Because there really is no torture greater than endlessly rambling on about unshakeable feelings for another person. That just results in cycles of meaningless emotional consumption, for myself and for whomever is listening. But books are different. I often look for books that are like medicine, that fit my situation and my thoughts, and I read them over and over again until the pages are tattered, underlining everything, and still the book will have something to give me. Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed. That’s one of the nicest things about books.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“We always put modifiers in front of ourselves, and I’m no exception to that. ‘Young’ is a modifier I can’t claim forever, but what I’m focusing on here are the expectations behind that word. It’s the same with what school you went to or what you studied at university. The expectation that all creative writing students write beautiful sentences and all [Korean] English graduates speak perfect English is inhibiting, if anything. It creates unnecessary pressure.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Today I deleted my school and work information on Facebook, because I wanted to erase the modifiers that followed my name. Displaying my school and occupation gave me brief feelings of superiority, but they also made me feel insecure. I hate the fact that I’m not a great writer despite my studies, that I haven’t read everything despite working at a publishing house. These modifiers can never explain the whole of a person.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“When a person I was jealous of turned out to have gone to a lower-tier school, I felt relief, and a person I had not thought much of suddenly seemed much smarter once I heard where they went to school – then the self-criticism that followed my guilt over these stupid thoughts.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Normally I’m afraid of adults (despite my having become one), and powerful adults even more so. So you can imagine how extra scary the CEO is to me.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“These memories made me think how the words ‘That person has changed’ are completely useless in some cases; it finally occurred to me that to expect someone to always be a certain way or consistently do a certain thing can be a huge burden on them.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“When we lose our sense of hope in our own lives, we can also lose the many touchstones in our lives. We don’t want to do anything, be part of anything, or want to be with anyone. All of our desire for relationships disappears, and we become totally isolated.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Rebecca Solnit said in The Faraway Nearby that empathy is an act of imagination. If I don’t plant the seed in myself, it will never grow. Which is why some people never seem to understand the lives of others. But the only way to create something inside me that is not there to begin with is through imagination. You’ve got to learn how to empathise, to imagine.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“But surely to create something in me that didn’t exist before and to extend emotional solidarity to another person is one of the rites of adulthood. We are so far, and yet so near to so many people.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“There are days when I wish I were numb, when I’m desperate to feel nothing. I want to be simple and cold and totally without feeling. Empathy has a large presence in my life, and it can cast a very long shadow. I can be watching a television drama or a movie, listening to a song or looking at a photograph, listening to someone’s story or writing my own, and my heart and mood will sink. Like a punctum they pierce me without context, a feeling I am very used to now and tired of.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Which is why I put up walls and tried to keep myself safe for so long. I thought I had built a shelter for myself, but I had only locked myself up in a prison (as much as I hate using that metaphor).”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“All kinds of negative emotions kept rising in me, leaving me unable to breathe. I needed to find a way to let them out.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Togetherness means altruism, and altruism is what saves us from selfishness. Because it begins with me and ends with everyone.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“When I happen to be writing on the bus and someone stands in front of me, I stop writing. Their eyes seem to be looking down right at my phone screen. I’m afraid they’ll be reading my thoughts, these thoughts that can be as dark as the most private parts of my diary. I consider my public persona as the cover for what is underneath, a membrane no light can seep through. The inner thoughts that do not make it through the membrane fester inside of me. Which is why my thoughts are never clean, and it’s hard to find a good thought in my inner rot. Just like muddy water filtered through a mesh still comes out brown, the thoughts I’ve refined and refined again are thick with darkness. I try to hide this through decorative words and metaphors. All this refining and decorating may look good, but it’s empty packaging.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I love the innocence of bright and honest people and adore the writings of positive thinkers, but I fear that I will never be able to find myself among them. I have trouble both accepting my own darkness and throwing myself into the light. I yearn to be valued by others, to be loved unconditionally by others, but I feign disinterest in others despite my substantial interest in them.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I try to create a path where there is no path, but no matter how much I pace that rough ground, it refuses to become a path. My toes keep kicking against the rocks.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“That honesty, which is an attitude, shows in the smallest of things and the most insignificant of moments. I tend to look closely at the eyes, gestures, speech and movements of a person in trying to discern them.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“The chin resting on a hand as they look towards me, the eyes concentrating on my mouth, the nodding, the hue and shading of their responses as they punctuate my story. I pour out my heart to them and answer questions they ask me. Every word becomes a question, and every word becomes an answer. This is what it feels like to have someone to whom you could reveal everything to, even when you’re not asked.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“When I love someone, I have many questions for them, but these questions are not always asked in words. Sometimes, they’re expressed in gestures. The chin resting on a hand as they look towards me, the eyes concentrating on my mouth, the nodding, the hue and shading of their responses as they punctuate my story. I pour out my heart to them and answer questions they ask me. Every word becomes a question, and every word becomes an answer. This is what it feels like to have someone to whom you could reveal everything to, even when you’re not asked.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“This is why I like people who draw answers from me without even asking a question, or who seem to answer my questions before I even ask them. This connection gives me the warmest of feelings.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“We often judge the whole by a single moment. A person may be very bookish and intellectual, but if they happen to be scrolling through their Instagram feed in front of me, I might judge them to be superficial. Which is why I feel that liking someone at first sight or the concept of destiny is a romanticised self-rationalisation. It’s all just timing. A moment where I happen to look special and you happen to look special – just a coincidence. But these beautiful coincidences are also responsible for most of our life’s relationships. Which is also why there’s no need to be cynical about them.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki