Kyung-sook Shin quotes

Kyung-sook Shin is a renowned South Korean author known for her evocative novels and short stories. Her work explores themes of memory, loss, and the complexities of modern Korean life. She is one of the first Korean writers to gain worldwide recognition, especially after winning the Man Asian Literary Prize. Here are 16 of her quotes:

People have lost something important they took for granted, and that loss leaves them devastated.

Kyung-sook Shin

She is like a great writer, with the power to read people; I was influenced by her. But hers wasn't a life where you could sit indoors with books.

Kyung-sook Shin

Even though each country has different cultural backgrounds and social traditions, the word "Mom” can evoke universal emotional responses. Additionally, the behavior of children is very similar across borders. Children's attitudes toward Mom and their tendency to forget her are similar all around the world...

Kyung-sook Shin

People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?

Kyung-sook Shin

You're paved in my heart like an old road. Like the pebbles in a pebble field, dirt in dirt, dust in dust, cobwebs in cobwebs.

Kyung-sook Shin

If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?

Kyung-sook Shin

Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture.

Kyung-sook Shin

Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong.

Kyung-sook Shin

Either a mother and daughter know each other very well or they are strangers.

Kyung-sook Shin

How can you live without trusting people? There are more people who are good than people who are bad!

Kyung-sook Shin

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.

Kyung-sook Shin

All I wanted was for you to be free from everything. And with that freedom, you often showed me another world, so I wanted you to be even freer. I wanted you to be so free that you would live your life for other people.

Kyung-sook Shin

...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?

Kyung-sook Shin

You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized.

Kyung-sook Shin