Nowhere to Be Found Quotes

“No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“You were born with a knife in your heart.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew a long time ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“You have the eyes of a wolf-girl whose heart has never once been moved. When I press my ear to your chest, I hear only wind and emptiness.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Even now I think maybe my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“I was only twenty-four, but I was tired.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“He knew how to accept the tedium without the ennui.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Being poor or being lonely could be either fortunate or unfortunate, but the truth is that the distinction was meaningless. Whether we were fortunate or not, we were still different, and that’s all there was to it.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. Wrap me in garbage bags and toss me in the incinerator. I'll turn into dioxin and make my way into your lungs. Stroke my face lightly with a razor blade and suck the blood that comes seeping out. Lap it up like a cat. I want to be covered in blood. I'll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me. The foul scent of burning hair. The heat.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“It wasn't so different from 1978, and it wasn't any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998. The people I met in 1988 were no different from those who bumped shoulders with me in the subway in 1978 and whose apathetic eyes met mine outside of a gas station in the middle of the night in 1998. They were family, and they were the unfamiliar middle class, and they were malnourished soldiers. They were each other's toilets and strangers and cliffs and crows and prisons. They were never anything more than who they were. Third person random.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“The prison of time called life.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by pathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“I'm taking my voice with me to the grave. I wouldn't leave it in a place like this. My blood is no vagrant.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“What my brother had promised when he squeezed my sweaty hand as if he’d never let go was not money or letters. It was the erasure of time that goes by the name of money and letters I understood that. The sort of time in which people could become the purest they'd ever been; cancel any unimportant plans they had; and long for a random, distant ideal. Our blood, which refused to be moved by a warm prayer over breakfast, a conversation with a loving family, a life that evolves step by step-that was what made my brother free. My brother, who was somewhere in the dark sewer tunnels of Osaka. I loved that brother. Not because he was family or because he’d bought me a washing machine. What he had left to me was a long-long-lived frigidity. The stillness of a beautiful, taxidermied want.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Silence. The silence inside a prison. The prison of time called life. The prison of class and circumstance. The prison of a code untranslatable into the language of the other. The prison of the flesh. The prison of sweaty hands that can't let go even at the moment of falling. The prison of Cheolsu.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Cheolsu was not there. Cheolsu fell like a crow from a white cliff while I wandered through a village of soldiers in the snow carrying Cheolsu's dead chicken before returning home and falling ill. Did Cheolsu know? Cheolsu grows up to become his mother and his father. Just as I grow up to become my mother and my father. But the other Cheolsu, who fell from the white cliff, and I would pass by in silence outside the window of an abandoned house in the rain. Rain falls on the corpses of time.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“Where have you been all this time? Were you off somewhere singing, putting cats to sleep on the porch, drifting about in the rapids of time, the glow of the morning sun and the rain of a summer afternoon beating down as you pass by, your lips shut tight like a bloodsucking plant? The me that is nowhere to be found now, the me that will turn to ash and vanish, turn to darkness and rot- -that me extends a squalid hand at the final moment of this crash, having entirely deserted and abandoned my life. In truth, I was not me. The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful. No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“rain falls on the corpses of time”
― bae suah , Nowhere to Be Found

“The father is a chief prosecuting attorney, but their kids aren’t doing well in school.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found

“I tell him, “All you have is my emptiness.”
― Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found