What We Kept to Ourselves Quotes

“When only one group of people represented the best, and declared the rules, of course others would often have to betray the self to live up to someone else.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“I think it’s because we work so much. We deny ourselves so much in our everyday lives. We need to survive, and yet surviving might be what is killing us.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“Some feelings couldn’t be erased. Life would be too easy if they could just end. They’d no longer be human.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“The smell of progress was ugly and never had an end, did it? When would we say enough was enough? Would we wait until the end of the world to feel our greatest regret? Why did we allow ourselves to feel so powerless in the face of a progress we didn’t want?”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“She adored the tree itself because it dared to be beautiful in every season with its bright chartreuse foliage of spring and summer, its red flames of fall, and the elegance of its bare branches, which would hang with any fruit that remained like sweet lanterns in winter.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“an account, both literal and metaphorical, a dwelling of story and stock.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“his ilk blamed immigrants, “outsiders,” for everything, for the problems we had all helped create or at least collectively ignored. But if they wanted to be upset at anyone, why not people with actual resources and wealth who didn’t pay their taxes and stole from everyone? Not some guy selling paletas out of a cart on the street or a woman who took your blood pressure at the hospital.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“Why was it so difficult to get rid of things you couldn’t even look at? When would he ever be able to think about the past without such a crushing sense of sadness?”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“Art made our hauntings not only tolerable but communal, and therefore powerful, like trauma transformed into treasure.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves

“The quiet beauty of the library might be that even at the end of the world, it would be the last structure where you didn’t need money to experience a sense of welcome, a broadness, this calm ocean of humanity.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves