Claudia > Claudia's Quotes

“I believe that the four elements and the psychological handicaps that they create are the real secret behind the "four princes " described in The Abramelin.


Each of the fo ur ancient elements has a positive psycho­ logical potential as well .

The earth element can allow mechan­ical dexterity, and the enjoyment of physical affection.

Water can provide intuition. Air can provide logic and problem­ solving skill s.

Fire can produce the ability to make decisions,and carry through with them.

Even if you already experience these things in some degree or another, they are somewhat repressed by self- doubt and anxiety.

Once you have attained the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel, you will have the ability to be the master of all of these elements, and that will be the beginning of true magi­ cal ability.”
― Jason Augustus Newcomb, 21st Century Mage: Bring the Divine Down to Earth

“Don't share anything with anyone. Ever.”
― Jeremy Maddux

“My youth is gone, but something far better has taken its place.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Toil & Trouble

“I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
― Michelle Zauner

“To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“The memories I stored, I could not let festered. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared I was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, and in every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“everything I might regret. She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Unlike the second languages I attempted to learn in high school, there are Korean words I inherently understand without ever having learned their definition. There is no momentary translation that mediates the transition from one language to another. Parts of Korean just exist somewhere as part of my psyche--words imbued with their pure meaning, not their English substitutes.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Cooking my mother's food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. Food was an unspoken language between us, had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.”
― Michelle Zauner

“I hadn’t believed in a god since I was about ten and still envisioned Mr. Rogers when I prayed, but the years that followed my mother’s passing were suspiciously charmed.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“She was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those to seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“We don’t talk about it. There’s never so much as a knowing look. We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate. We bring the haul back to our dorm rooms or our suburban kitchens, and we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey. What we’re looking for isn’t available at a Trader Joe’s. H Mart is where your people gather under one odorous roof, full of faith that they’ll find something they can’t find anywhere else.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“For the first time it occurred to me that what she sought in my face might be fading. I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, to make sense of me.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I think Halmoni and Eunmi and your mom is very happy," Nami said. She flipped the heart charm on the necklace I gave her so it faced forward. "They are all in heaven together, playing hwatu and drinking soju, happy we are here together.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“it felt like a time to choose living over dying.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Save your tears for when your mother dies.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart