The Calligrapher's Daughter Quotes

“It was pointless to worry about problems I didn't yet have.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter

“It was incredible, this human capacity for learning, for hope, for love, that persisted like to box of light in my cell, the waters that flowed in my dreams. It was beyond my understanding. Tears came as I surrendered to this wonderment of being.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter

“This is the great gift that God has given to women,” she said, “and women alone.” She smoothed her skirt and blanket over her legs. “Following the glory of Jesus’s example, we suffer with the greatest gifts we receive. This is something that a man will never understand in the way a woman will. Certainly a man’s seed is essential, but the creation of life is within us. For them it is outside. They are our fathers, husbands and our sons, and it’s your duty to honor and respect them, but this they will always be standing outside of.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter: A Novel

“We were Methodists now and didn’t worship our ancestors as gods. But the commandments that decreed the one true God also said to honor thy father and mother. So it was right, Mother said, to follow the old ways and esteem our predecessors who had paved the paths upon which we walked.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter: A Novel

“You must always think first of your family, your father, and put your own thoughts and desires last.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter: A Novel

“Without having to confine my dreams to the destiny outlined in one’s name and the expectations bestowed during one’s naming, I was left free to embrace the natural turns of my character and to determine my own future, drawing from the deepest well on unnamed possibilities.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter

“My mother was not one to say to her children “I love you”. It was an assumed truth, given freely at the gate of the womb.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter

“I sipped, thanking the particles of tea leaves for absorbing the sun’s heat on dewy terraced mountains, growing fat and lustrous, then drying in the same heat, preserving God’s grace in a fragile, fragrant medium for me to drink at this table.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter

“She kept her voice gentle and her eyes down, for without such softening traits, Haejung's mother had often said, a woman's presence would be like a thorn and not a flower.”
― Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher's Daughter