Korea Quotes

“Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“Why does nothing change, even when you set out for a faraway place?”
― Young-Ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“We have to be tougher in this tough world.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“Love has different shape, like this falling snow in winter”
― Rizki De, Endless Winter in Korea

“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.”
― Thomas M Smith

“If Korea were a person, it would be diagnosed as a neurotic, with both an inferiority and a superiority complex.”
― Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.”
― Boris Johnson

“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.”
― Cullen Thomas, Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

“Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.”
― Don DeLillo

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“But,” began the Zainichi North Korean man, “even if we know all that stuff, isn’t it pointless if the people discriminating against you don’t?”

“What matters is that we know,” I said. “Those ignorant haters who discriminate based on nationality and ethnicity are pathetic. We need to educate ourselves and make ourselves stronger and forgive them. Not that I’m anywhere near that yet.”
― Kazuki Kaneshiro, Go

“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.”
― Cullen Thomas, Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

“When Korea was divided, we were still nationals of a unified Korea. It was called Choson. At separation, the Japanese government gave us permission to keep our Korean identity, but we had to choose between North and South. Many people chose the North, because of their family or because they considered the North more in line with our country’s traditions. There was no way of knowing how things would turn out. Your grandmother and I chose the South because we were from Seoul. That was the only reason. We knew nothing about any of the rest of it. Political questions meant nothing to us, the Cold War, Russia, the United States. Koreans who live in Japan have never known North and South Korea. We are all people of Choson. People from a country that no longer exists.”
― Elisa Shua Dusapin, The Pachinko Parlour

“Father wept as he recalled that one spring day, when they shared for lunch the scabbard fish that Mom had cooked in the morning and, stomachs full, napped together, stretched out. He said that back then he didn't know that this was happiness.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“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.”
― Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch

“In town, during the week, I pocketed my emotions—silent and screaming anguish in all shades of red—Father’s way. But on these trips out of town, the neung-jae grasses that skimmed my body ripped holes in my pockets and emptied all the red I had saved.”
― Myun Haing Kim

“As boys grow to men, they keep score on their fathers. In one column goes the wins—the times he protected his family, provided for them so they did not know hunger, taught his children how to navigate the world. In the other column are his sins. Sometimes, these losses weigh heavily.”
― Myun Haing Kim

“Happiness is found in simplicity and commonness. Or maybe happiness descends from the sky like it did that hot August day. More than seven decades on, I suspect happiness is the capacity to stay human. I still don’t know for sure.”
― Myun Haing Kim

“The experts only try to discourage me by identifying risks and obstacles. Had I listened to their advice, I would have ended up doing nothing.

Park Chung Hee”
― Byung-Kook Kim & Ezra F. Vogel

“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.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“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.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“Buddhism first came to Korea during the fourth century a.d. Virtually from its inception on the peninsula, the religion was a principal force behind social and technological change in Korea. Along with their religion, Buddhist missionaries introduced to Korea a wide cross-section of Sinitic culture and thought, including the Chinese writing system, calendrics, and architecture. Buddhist spiritual technologies were also considered to offer powers far superior to those of the indigenous religion of Shamanism. For all these reasons, Buddhism became an integral part of the religio-political nexus of Korea during the Unified Silla (668-935) and Koryŏ (937-1392) dynasties. Buddhism therefore provided the foundation for Korean national ideology for over a millennium.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
Albert Einstein”
― Talitha Beck, You Are My Destiny

“They made it illegal to speak Korean. You could be sentenced to death for speaking it. And do you know what your grandmother’s mother did to avoid being subjected to speaking Japanese at school? She sliced off part of her own tongue.”
― Elisa Shua Dusapin, The Pachinko Parlour

“In June 1949, the Koreans who previously had belonged to the Japanese Communist Party migrated en masse into the newly created Korean Workers’ Party, as the North Korean communist party was called. Like its counterparts all over the world, the KWP showed a formidable knack for creating associations with the allure of democracy and openness to the public. There were women’s associations, movements for the defence of culture and peace, sports clubs, and various other groups which the Party could influence from the shadows. My grandmother was among the Party’s most active organisers and eventually became director for the Kyoto region.”
― Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

“Koreans never had an easy time integrating into Japanese life and often were targets of prejudice. The North Korean propaganda thus resonated with many in the diaspora, and thousands responded to Kim Il-Sung’s call to return. Well-to-do Koreans such as my grandparents could be expected to be wooed with an equal measure of ideological arguments and fantastical promises: there were managerial positions awaiting them, they were entitled to a beautiful home, they would have no material worries, and their children would be able to study in Moscow.”
― Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

“I have since learned that at other latitudes and at other times, the same Communist powers created similar traps for making people believe and hope in illusions. This led to the misery of countless peoples: in France, in America, in Egypt, and perhaps most notably, in Armenia. Tens of thousands died there in 1947 under the spell of Stalin’s propaganda, which had painted the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia as the land of milk and honey. The Soviets… promised that the ancestral culture and religion would be respected and that the newcomers would shortly see a new generation rise and flourish in social justice.”
― Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

“It was like the city was dead – the strangest atmosphere. The people all looked so shabby and aimless in their wandering. There was a feeling of deep sadness in the air…”
― Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

“What happened? We sent our family and friends letters warning people not to come! Why didn’t your family listen? … You’re not going to build a new life here; your parents will be stripped of all their belongings, then left to die. You’ll soon find out what these North Korean Communists are all about.”
― Kang Chol-Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag