cait

“I had always liked the act of leaving, the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“This is how I lived back then– through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanking, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it's as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts