Highway with Green Apples Quotes

“To the final darkness of summer before the oncoming dawn, I whisper: “I don’t know anything.” I’m not thrilled by sex, and I’m not moved by love.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“Tell me what you like, what you want to do.”
“I like having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like watching the rain through a big plate-glass window.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“What about what you want to do in the future?”
“Oh, that? … I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“It doesn’t make you carsick?” he asked. “It’s just a sketch,” I said. “And anyway, it’s not me drawing but a stranger inside of me who compels me to draw. When that happens, I have no choice but to draw, even while driving.” “Why do you talk like that?” He was always criticizing me for not sounding more like his mother or older sister. “Why can’t you just say, ‘I feel like drawing, so I have to draw.’ I think you like it when I can’t understand you.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“Who do you think you are? Is it too much to ask for a cup of coffee? You’re a woman, aren’t you? What do you think you’ll do once you’re married? I shouldn’t have to call for you all day long just to get a glass of water! You’re pretty stuck-up for someone with grades like yours.” My father said to my mother, “What’s wrong with her? She used to be a good girl. It’s your fault she turned out that way. All she does is sulk.” My mother’s face turned deathly pale. I witnessed all of this through the wide-open door of my parents’ room. “She takes after her aunt,” my mother said. “You know as well as I do how stubborn and empty-headed that younger sister of yours is. Besides, it’s not like I had her alone. Why do you blame everything on me?”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“The sound of the nail clippers must have annoyed my brother, because he stuck his head out the door and yelled at me to be quiet. My mother, who felt nothing for my father, discovered the glass I’d broken while doing the dishes and scolded me from inside the kitchen, as if she’d finally found the proper outlet for her frustration. Crickets chirped in the corner of the yard. I asked myself over and over, When will I ever get out of here?”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“I wish you were a different type of girl,” he continues. “The type who cries and refuses to let go when a guy breaks up with her. The type who says, ‘How dare you see another woman, I won’t stand for it.’ If you were that type, you would never have gotten this call from me. But, we were good in the beginning! You said so yourself.” Those words—You said so yourself—sound so oddly like begging that I find myself saying yes despite myself. He forgot it was my birthday. I don’t feel like reminding him, either.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“I met someone. I think I’m in love. She’s tiny and cute. You would like her. I told her all about you. She’s…” Here, he lights a cigarette. I hear the all-too-familiar sound of his lighter over the phone. The blue-green flame. “She really puts me at ease. It’s different than when I’m with you. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I had a problem with you. Not at all. It’s just that, with her, I never feel anxious about what I’m supposed to do next. I could never cheat on someone like her.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“I am a twenty-five year-old who goes to bed every night wondering what I will do the next day. By now, all the other women I know who went to the same all-girls high school as me are at their most self-assured, having married or living as career women in the big city, but I am as unsure of myself as I was at fifteen.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“The world collapses silently around them.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“I like having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like watching the rain through a big plate-glass window.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“It feels good to stand on a wet street late at night in a white cotton coat and smoke a cigarette while looking at the lights of a convenience store across the street.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“He once admitted he’d felt disappointed to discover that I didn’t know how to make pickled radishes or grilled fish, and wouldn’t sweetly knot his neckties for him like I did when I was working. I’d told him I wasn’t looking for a man who would be my rock in life. That was another shock to him.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“The weather is very hot, but the sky is blue and the sunlight as sharp as glass. My rented room has a tiny balcony with a nice view. I had thought about lying out there on a towel in my bathing suit with my Walkman in my ears so I could get a tan. All I needed was a pair of sunglasses, oil, and an Agatha Christie novel.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“To the final darkness of summer before the oncoming dawn, I whisper: “I don’t know anything.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples