So Won > So Won's Quotes

“It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes--so this is how she became a woman.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“People of God should not forget people trapped in darkness. We must always remember the forgotten people through prayer and through acts of compassion.”
― Kenneth Bae, Not Forgotten: The True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea

“The warden came in to say good-bye. He grabbed my hand, shook it, and said with tears in his eyes, "I want to see you again sometime."
"Yes," I said, "I would like to come back and see you as well.”
― Kenneth Bae, Not Forgotten: The True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea

“Day after day goes by, and God keeps looking, looking....Doesn't anyone want to call out for his blessing? Upon whom can he pour his grace? Isn't anyone interested?”
― Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire

“God will manifest himself in direct proportion to our passion for him.”
― Jim Cymbala

“I haven't spoken to him since before that. I never understood how he could just drop me like that. Is it a Korean thing? I mean, what kind of person does that?”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I better tell you before, I know, but I know you don't like. So what I do?”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Sometimes they would group up and play a team of Hispanic men who were also picnicking with their families. Once, they even played some black men, though my father pointed out to us in the car home that they were African blacks. Somehow there were rarely white people in the park, never groups of their families, just young couples, if anything.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I walked back to the living room and found my father asleep on the sofa, his round mouth pursed and tightly shut, his breath filtering softly through his nose. A single fly, its armored back an oily, metallic green, was dancing a circle on his chin. What he'd brought home from work.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“The only noticeable thing was that he would come home much earlier than usual, maybe four in the afternoon instead of the usual eight or nine. He said he didn't want me coming home from school to an empty house, though he didn't actually spend any more time with me.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I told him I would go up there; he said no, no, everything was fine. I drove up anyway and when I opened the door to the house he was sitting alone in the kitchen, the kettle on the stove madly whistling away. He was fast asleep; after the stroke he sometimes nodded off in the middle of things. I woke him, and when he saw me he patted my cheek. 'Good boy,' he muttered. I made him change his clothes and then fixed us a dinner of fried rice from some leftovers.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“He didn't say anything and just helped me to my room...He gently patted my back and then left the house and drove off to one of his stores in the city.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Don't shame him! Your father is very proud. You don't know this, but he graduated from the best college in Korea, the very top, and he doesn't need to talk about selling fruits and vegetables. It's below him. He only does it for you, Byong-ho, he does everything for you. Now go and keep him company...I would learn in subsequent years that he had been trained as an industrial engineer, and had actually completed a master's degree.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I was to inherit them, the legacy unfurling before me this way: you worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride. You drove a Chevy and then a Caddy and then a Benz. You never missed a mortgage payment or a day of church. You prayed furiously until you wept. You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Every means and source of struggle. They peeled and sorted and bunched and sprayed and cleaned and stacked and shelved and swept; my father put them to anything for which they didn't have to speak. They both had college degrees and knew no one in the country and spoke little English. The men, whom I knew as Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kim, were both recent immigrants in their thirties with wives and young children. They worked twelve-hour days six days a week for $200 cash and meals and all the fruit and vegetables we couldn't or wouldn't sell; it was the typical arrangement. My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Lelia had great trouble accepting this stunning ignorance of mine...She didn't understand that there weren't moments in our language when the woman's name could have naturally come out.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“세상에는 나쁜 사람이 많이 있지.

하지만 착한 사람도 많아.

둘 다 진짜 맞는 말이야.”
― 요시타케 신스케