Yi Sang Quotes

“My face becomes a strip of skin before your face in moonlight my words of praise for you are left unsaid but like a sigh they tickle open a sliding paper door and creep into your hair smelling like camellia fields and transplant seedlings of my sorrow”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“A red ink is spilled from an imitation heart. In my dream I am late. I am sentenced to death. I am not the ruler of my dream. It is a great crime to seal up two humans who cannot even shake hands.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“This exhaustion will be my fall, but I should not try to fight it. I should overcome it. An out-of-body experience. Shoeless feet shed their legs in the vacant heaven.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“I am absent in my dream. In my mirror my counterfeit does not make an entrance. He craves my loneliness despite my uselessness. I have finally made up my mind to recommend suicide to him. I point him toward the viewless window. It is a win­ dow for suicide. But he instructs me that if I do not kill myself then he cannot kill himself either. The me-inside-the-mirror is almost a phoenix.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“Tomorrow I will try to enjoy looking at flowers all day. I will rub away my worries with an alcohol-soaked cottonball. Because my dreams have been so trou­bling, I want to dream a dream filled with blossoming flowers, a dream of gravure of primary hues, like a colorful picture book. I would like to compose a refreshing poem, in a 7-point font, for each illustration of my dreams.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“Can burning organs be distinguished from a drowning cattle shed?”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“and then do we consider it something that constantly decays, an atom is an atom is an atom is an atom, do physiological effects mutate, an atom is not an atom is not an atom is not an atom, does radiation mean decay, that people live through an eternal eternity means that life is not living nor is it life but it is light and it is it is.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works