Geral(dine)’s Reviews > Human Acts > Status Update

📚 137
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass l.

📚 122
That was what captured me, what has stayed with me ever since. Have you even known it, professor - that terrifying intensity, that feeling as if you yourself have undergone some kind of alchemy, been purified, made wholly virtuous? The brilliance of that moment, the dazzling purity of conscience
[...] perhaps they would have considered even death a fair exchange for that jewel of conscience.

📚 Page 89
(...) there was something shameful about eating. Gripped by this familiar shame, she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. It was that which had tormented her for the past five years - that she could still feel hunger, still salivate at the sight of food.

💬 chapter 2/"the boys friend" was amazing, edges and pieces caught in my throat. I do wonder if the rest of the chapters will hold up or if I'll always think back on it

📚 57
We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us. All the same, there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad. Mine, on the other hand, crushed out of shape beneath a tower of others, was shameful, detestable.

📚 52
No one had ever taught me how to address a person's soul. And perhaps, or so it seemed, my companion was equally baffled. Without the bulwark of language, still we sensed, as a physical force, our existence in the mind of the other. When eventually, I felt him sigh away, his resignation, his abandonment, left me alone again.

📚 31
'The soldiers are the scary ones,' you said with a half-smile. 'What's frightening about the dead?'

📚 18
The national anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against the constant background of weeping, and you listened with bated breath to the subtle dissonance this created. As though this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was.

📚 18
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.

💬 from what I understood of the books summary there will be changing POVs & with the heavy topic the second person narration is obviously gonna help frame & feel ....BUT.....
....MY GOD DO I HATE THAT WRITING STYLE.... always hits me in the head when I'm not prepared for it because I like to forget it exists... (This is on me and very, very nit picky. Han Kang writes well I'm just an annoying cunt sometimes)