den > den's Quotes

“She doesn’t understand that I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“I will build myself up so high in such a short time that when he leaves me, I will become a lightning storm, a nuclear apocalypse.

I will not come out of this with nothing.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else. That's just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid-fire questions the minute they meet you. Which neighborhood do you live in? Where did you go to school? Where do you work? Do you know so-and-so? They pinpoint where you are on the national scale of status, then spit you out in a heartbeat.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“...you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“In New York, you can talk to anyone about anything at any time and have a conversation so long you'll fall a little in love with that person, and then never see them again.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“IN THE ORIGINAL STORY, the little mermaid endures unspeakable pain to gain her human legs. The Sea Witch warns her that her new feet will feel as if she is walking on whetted blades, but she will be able to dance like no human has ever danced before. And so she drinks the witch’s potion, which slices through her body like a sword.
What I want to say, is that she danced divinely with her beautiful legs, even through the pain of a thousand knives. She was able to walk and run and stay close to her beloved prince, and even when things didn’t work out with him, that wasn’t the point.
And in the end, after she said goodbye to her prince and flung herself into the sea, expecting to disintegrate into sea foam, she was carried away by the children of light and air.
ISN’T THAT a beautiful story?”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“But books were different. They had lots of blanks. Blanks between words and even between lines. I could squeeze myself in there and sit, or walk, or scribble down my thoughts. It didn’t matter if I had no idea what the words meant. Turning the pages was half the battle.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“I shall love thee. Even if I can never know whether my love would be a sin or poison or honey, I shall not stop this journey of loving thee.”
― Won-pyung Sohn

“There was more than one type of perfectionist. And that I qualified because the kind of perfectionist I was, was the kind that abandoned everything if I wasn’t good enough at it. And that’s why I couldn’t finish tasks.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“Don't you find it fascinating that we don't know what we don't know?" -Jayne

"It is fascinating. Knowing that we don't know everything leaves room for mindfulness. It opens up the possibility that thoughts and feelings can change. Perception is a lot more subjective that anyone feels in the moment." -Gina”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“Cancer must feel like such a betrayal, knowing that somewhere deep in your body you're manufacturing tiny bombs that detonate and catch fire”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Listen, if there is a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that's true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive?”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“You're never alone when there's a book,' she used to say. 'Never ever.”
― Riley Sager, The Only One Left

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Why do I have to tell a story?” I asked.
“Because if you don’t tell the story, someone else will tell it for you.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Inheritance Games

“I know that I should try to forget you but the thought of you ignites the part of me that wants unattainable things like beauty and thunder, hurtling towards a sense of something I cannot explain.”
― Jessica Andrews, Milk Teeth

“I wonder if anyone actually knows what they want, truly and deeply, without people or situations clouding their judgement. I wonder if we ever truly want anything, or whether we just respond to the world around us, if our feelings are reactive or whether they come from somewhere deeper.”
― Jessica Andrews, Milk Teeth