Seung

“But is it not a mistake on your part
to think that you are not forcing him and not punishing him?
Are you not binding him with the bonds of your love? Do you
not shame him every day and do you not make things still
harder for him through your kindness and patience? Are you
not forcing him, this high-strung and spoiled boy, to live in a
hut with two old banana munchers, for whom rice is already a
delicacy, whose thoughts could not be his, whose hearts are
old and at peace and move at a different pace from his? Is all
that not force and a punishment?”
― Herman Hesse

“Where did my child learn to die? Who taught her that one day”
― Kim Bo-young, A Plagued Sea

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“although the universe is boundless”
― Kim Bo-young, I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories