Aya

“It was also revealed that the reason I am cruel to others is because I have low-self-esteem. Because I don’t love myself, I am unable to understand those who do love me in spite of it all, and so I test them. “You love me even when I do this? Or this? Or this?” Even when the other person forgives me, I am unable to understand their forgiveness, and when they give up on me, I torture and console myself with the “fact” that no one could ever love me. That goddamn self-esteem. [...] Looking more closely at myself, there are parts that I've improved on. I still remain someone who is unable to love herself. But as I had that thought, I had another: light and darkness are part of the same thing. Happiness and unhappiness alternate throughout life, as in a dance. So as long as I keep going and don’t give up, surely I will keep having moments of tears and laughter.

This book, therefore, ends not with answers but with a wish. I want to love and be loved. I want to find a way where I don’t hurt myself. I want to live a life where I say things are good more than things are bad. I want to keep failing and discovering new and better directions. I want to enjoy the tides of feeling in me as the rhythms of life. I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time.
Some day, I will.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“There is no absolute good when it comes to relationships. And it's perfectly healthy to have disagreements with friends and lovers from time to time. I just hope you learn to differentiate the parts from the whole. Just because you like one ting about a person, you don't need to like everything about them. And just because you don't like one thing about a person, it doesn't mean the person as a whole isn't worth your time. I think you should get in the habit of thinking differently.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I tend to go back and forth between romanticism and cynicism. Crossing those barriers between hot and cold, I forget the lukewarm boredom of life; that lukewarm state is what I fear the most. Unable to return to feeling hot or cold, to be numb within a state of room temperature. In that state, we’re nothing better than dead.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I don’t know why an individual has to be treated as less-than and strive to fit society’s standards when it’s the people who denigrate
others who are the real problem. That frustrates me. That I can’t step out of this frame, that I still feel inferior when I meet someone supposedly superior to me, and that I feel confident and comfortable when I meet someone supposedly inferior – I
absolutely loathe that about myself.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki