“Go-saeng," Yangjin said out loud. "A woman's lot is to suffer."
"Yes, go-saeng." Kyunghee nodded, repeating the word for suffering.
All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer - suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother - die suffering. Go-saeng - the word made her sick. What else was there besides this? She had suffered to create a better life for Noa, and yet it was not enough. Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she'd drunk like water? In the end, he had refused to suffer the conditions of his birth. Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?”
Source: Pachinko
“Only once you can truthfully say you are grateful for your victimization have you transcended it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“There are many injustices that will simply never be made right, and to expect otherwise is to set yourself up to be consumed by frustration.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“To expect a hospitable world is hubris. Instead, expect the opposite. Expect a world that may destroy you at its whim at any moment.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Conversion must result in a change of attitude and values. Otherwise, it is no conversion. If you say, “I now love Jesus, but I still hate certain people,” you do not really love Jesus.”
Source: The Journey: Spiritual Growth in Galatians and Philippians
“It takes two of us to discover truth: one to utter it and one to understand it.”
Source: Sand and Foam
“He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: "What is this? Can it be that it is Death?" And the inner voice answered: Yes, it is Death. "Why these sufferings?" And the voice answered, For no reason—they just are so.”
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych
“The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.”
Source: Flaubert's Parrot
“The Wound
I climbed to the crest,
And, fog-festooned,
The sun lay west
Like a crimson wound:
Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I’d given no sign
That it pierced me through.”
Source: Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses
“The Dead Man Walking
They hail me as one living,
But don't they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?
I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
Ashes gone cold.
Not at a minute's warning,
Not in a loud hour,
For me ceased Time's enchantments
In hall and bower.
There was no tragic transit,
No catch of breath,
When silent seasons inched me
On to this death ....
— A Troubadour-youth I rambled
With Life for lyre,
The beats of being raging
In me like fire.
But when I practised eyeing
The goal of men,
It iced me, and I perished
A little then.
When passed my friend, my kinsfolk,
Through the Last Door,
And left me standing bleakly,
I died yet more;
And when my Love's heart kindled
In hate of me,
Wherefore I knew not, died I
One more degree.
And if when I died fully
I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
I am to-day,
Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
I live not now.”
Source: Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses