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Quote by Kang Han

“To wrap them in the Taegukgi—we wanted to do that much for them, at least. We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute's silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.”

Quote by Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

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“The door leading back to that summer has been slammed shut; you've made sure of that. But that means that the way is also closed that might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“Some weekend afternoon when the sun-drenched scene outside the window seems unusually still and Dong-ho's profile fits into your mind, mighn't the thing flickering in front of your eyes be what they call a soul? In the early hours of the morning, when dreams you can't remember have left your cheeks wet and the contours of that face jolt into an abrupt clarity, mighn't that wavering be a soul's emergence?”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“Don't die. Just don't die.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“I can't get my head around why I didn't just call your name that day. Why I just came tottering on behind, struggling for breath and dumb as a mute. If I call your name next time, will you please just turn around? You don't need to say "Yes, Mum?" or anything like that. Just turn round so I can see you.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“At the time, death seemed as though it would be something refreshing, like slipping on that clean new uniform. If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“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.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“The sound woke me up, but I didn't have the courage to open my eyes, so I kept them closed and strained to listen in the darkness.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“I prayed every night. I don't mean anything formal, I'd never been a regular at any temple or church. I just asked to be set free from that hell. But they were answered, you see, my prayers were answered.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“At the time, you were more closely acquainted than most with brutalized corpses, yet there have only been a handful of times in the past twenty-odd years when your dreams have been vivid with blood. Rather, your nightmares tend to be cold, silent affairs. Scenes from which the blood has dried without a trace, and the bones have weathered into ash.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts

“The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column. I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”

Human Acts Kang Han

Book:Human Acts

Source: Human Acts