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Korea Quotes

“This country has not seen and probably will never know the true level of sacrifice of our veterans. As a civilian I owe an unpayable debt to all our military. Going forward let’s not send our servicemen and women off to war or conflict zones unless it is overwhelmingly justifiable and on moral high ground. The men of WWII were the greatest generation, perhaps Korea the forgotten, Vietnam the trampled, Cold War unsung and Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan vets underestimated. Every generation has proved itself to be worthy to stand up to the precedent of the greatest generation. Going back to the Revolution American soldiers have been the best in the world. Let’s all take a remembrance for all veterans who served or are serving, peace time or wartime and gone or still with us. 11/11/16 May God Bless America and All Veterans.”

WarAmericaFreedomCourageSacrificeMilitaryRevolutionHonorArmyIndependenceIraqRevolutionaryServiceCombatAfghanistanVietnamCold WarSelflessnessVeteranNavyKoreaMemorialSealsMemorial DayRangersVeteransMarinesCoast GuardAirforceCoastguardPj SMarine CorpSocomSof
Author:Thomas M Smith
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“Modern Zen training offers a matrix within which to evaluate the way one tradition of Zen understands—and puts into practice—the doctrines and teachings of its religion. While Zen training in Korea will differ in certain respects from that followed by the patriarchs and ancient masters of classical Ch'an in China or by Zen monks in Japan, it is an authentic model of how the monks of one national tradition of Zen have tackled "the practical matter of how to live with [their] belief.”

ZenKorea
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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“Korean Zen—known as Son—is also a tradition worthy of far more attention than it has gleaned to date in Western scholarship. Indeed, given the pervasive emphasis on Japanese forms of Zen found in Western literature on the tradition (as indicated by our common English usage of the Japanese pronunciation "Zen" to represent all the national branches of the school), we may forget that there are other, equally compelling and authentic approaches to Zen thought and practice found elsewhere in Asia.”

ZenKorea
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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“Đâu phải thế. Chỉ cần không bao giờ quên thì sẽ có ngày chị thực hiện được thôi. Nếu chị quên ước mơ là mọi chuyện sẽ chấm dứt đấy. Nếu luôn giữ khao khát muốn tiến gần tới ước mơ rồi sẽ có ngày chị làm được mà. Cứ đi cứ đi rồi cũng sẽ có ngày đến được khu rừng đó. Thậm chí, dù không thể đến nơi cũng đã gần hơn ban đầu rất nhiều rồi.”

NovelKorea
Book:The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness
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“Viết, có phải chính là như thế? Chừng nào còn viết thì chừng đó sẽ không bao giờ có thời gian nào là thời gian đã qua? Như cá hồi ngược dòng bơi về nguồn, sẵn lòng toạc vây vượt qua cả thác nước, có lẽ nào đó cũng là số phận được trao cho nhà văn - cái số phận phải theo dòng hiện tại bơi ngược về quá khứ đau thương. Cá hồi luôn quay về. Giữ trong bụng vết thương sâu, bằng mọi giá mạo hiểm cả mạng sống của chính mình để vượt thác quay về. Phải, quay về. Theo con đường mình đã từng qua, dò dẫm từng bước một, chỉ mình con đường ấy.”

NovelKorea
Book:The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness
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“Tuổi tác không phải lúc nào cũng tăng theo chuỗi số tuần tự. Người ta có thể một ngày nào đó biến từ mười sáu sang ba mươi hai tuổi. Chính vào cái ngày đó ở nhà hàng đó, tôi, mười sáu tuổi, đã đột ngột thành ba mươi, hay ba mươi hai tuổi. Vào cái ngày tôi nhìn anh cả ngồi rã rời trong khói sườn nướng, đãi chị họ và tôi bữa sường trong khi chính anh không ăn dù chỉ một miếng, tôi tin rằng tôi đã ba mươi hai, đúng bằng tuổi của tôi bây giờ”

NovelKorea
Book:The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness
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“It was easy not to like the other foreigners. I wondered how I'd fallen in with such a band of freaks. There were so many odd, wandering types--a host of bent Australians, warped British, tainted Canadians, tormented runaway Americans. (I considered myself fairly well balanced among this cast, but then look what became of me.) I'd expected it to a certain degree, but I was still surprised. Most of them seemed like misfits. Only a few content. But all of us found teaching work with astounding ease. It didn't matter that, on the whole, we were ragged and suspect because the demand for English in Korea was so great that almost anyone was accepted.”

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Book:Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
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“Korean woman who had escaped from the North to the South. She was talking about love. ‘If you grow up in the West,’ she said, ‘you may think romance occurs naturally, but it does not. You learn how to be romantic from books and movies, or from observation. But there was no model to learn from in my parents’ time. They didn’t even have the language to talk about their feelings. You just had to guess how your beloved felt from the look in his eyes, or the tone of her voice as she spoke to you.”

LoveCultureWestEastKorea
Book:Elizabeth Finch
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“Since I am the child of parents with North Korean citizenship, I automatically became a Zainichi Chosenjin with North Korean citizenship. Like I said, when I was a kid, I thought that Hawaii was the symbol of depraved capitalism. I grew up surrounded by books written by Marx, Lenon, Trotsky, and Che Guevara. I attended a Chongryon-run Korean school, where I was taught that America was the enemy. Even so, that doesn't mean I was infected by communist ideology. I didn't give a damn about North Korea, Marx, Chongryon, Korean schools, or America. I was just living with the circumstances that I happened to be born into. And given those screwed-up circumstances, naturally I became a misfit. I mean, how could I have turned out otherwise?”

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Book:Go
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“I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North in 1951, I was taken to see the beautifully preserved tombs of King and Queen Kongmin. Their significance in F.M.-L.B. cosmology is that they reigned over a then unified Korea in the 14th century, and that they were Confucian and dynastic and left many lavish memorials to themselves. The tombs are built on one hillside, and legend has it that the king sent one of his courtiers to pick the site. Second-guessing his underling, he then climbed the opposite hill. He gave instructions that if the chosen site did not please him he would wave his white handkerchief. On this signal, the courtier was to be slain. The king actually found that the site was ideal. But it was a warm day and he forgetfully mopped his brow with the white handkerchief. On coming downhill he was confronted with the courtier's fresh cadaver and exclaimed, 'Oh dear.' And ever since, my escorts told me, the opposite peak has been known as 'Oh Dear Hill.' I thought this was a perfect illustration of the caprice and cruelty of absolute leadership, and began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong Il being the 'Oh Dear Leader,' but it died on my lips.”

ReligionCrueltyIdeologyCommunismNationalismKoreaTotalitarianismNorth KoreaXenophobiaFarceConfucianismCapriceAbsolutismKarl MarxKim Jong IlKim Il SungVladimir Lenin14th CenturyQueen NogukTomb Of King KongminVeneration Of The Dead
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“News “…she fell into the water from the sky…” Jae-in Doe Decedent is an Asian female. Twenty-two she just had turned. The cause of death we cannot tell Despite the many things we’ve learned. TOP SECRET My Doe-type can be difficult to track. Yet here I am, my voice-box playing back From lips hydrangea-lavender in hue His thoughts during our first few interviews. The hair is shoulder-length, the color black. The height and weight suggest she won’t fight back. The fingernails are unadorned and short. The eyes are brown; no makeup do they sport. The skin appears unpierced and untattooed, Yet scars of ruby-pearl seem to protrude Like self-inflicted jewelry on each arm And wrist—which means she’s vulnerable to harm. The language of her flesh, as I assess her, Reveals Confucian worship of professors. Her deference Korean gives me right To use her innocence for my delight.”

PoetryEducationMisogynyKoreaRape CultureConfucianismSpeculative PoetryBlazon
Book:The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018: New Fiction, Poetry, and Category-Defying Literary Gems
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“Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.”

ChinaJapanWorld War IiKoreaNorth KoreaSouth KoreaKorean WarSiberiaMao Zedong1945Joseph StalinKim Il Sung1953PyongyangCurtis LemayKorean Demilitarized ZoneDivision Of KoreaHermit KingdomKorea Under Japanese Rule
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“I smiled as I stood by the curb. 4:20 in the morning. But you know what? I wanted to go somewhere, but not home. Only one place I could think of: Itaewon. Like destiny, an orange cab slowed down in front of me. I climbed in and yelled, "Hey Mister, Itaewon Fire Station." Had the streetlamps and neon signs always been this spectacularly bright? Why was Seoul so beautiful all of a sudden? Everything that was once nothing seemed special and amazing somehow. And wouldn't you know it, the taxi fare still was more than 10,000 won, even when the surcharge period was over. Only 20,000 won left on this card, how was I going to get home later? Eh, whatever. I'd survive. The traffic began getting bad at Hannam-dong. I hopped out in front of the CJ Building and ran the rest of the way to G—.”

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Book:Love in the Big City
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“Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation. This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid. We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.”

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Book:Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
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“If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don't think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership.”

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Author:Bryan Fischer
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