“You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Either a mother and daughter know each other very well or they are strangers.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“إن معظم الاشياء في العالم لا تأتي غير متوقعة إن فكر المرء فيها بعناية. فحتى الأشياء التي قد يظنها غير اعتيادية، هي في الواقع أشياء كان المقرر لها أن تحدث. وإن صادف المرء أحداثا غير اعتيادية،فهذا يعني غالبا انه لا يفكر في الأمور مليا.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Mom's eyes held yours for a moment. 'I don't like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.' Mom's expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, 'If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“إن صمت الموتى يجعل الباقين على قيد الحياة يصابون بالجنون.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Even though nobody knew that you were in my life, you were the person who brought a raft at every rapid current and helped me cross that water safely. I was happy that you were there. I came to tell you I was able to travel through my life because I could come to you when I was anxious, not when I was happy.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“All I wanted was for you to be free from everything. And with that freedom, you often showed me another world, so I wanted you to be even freer. I wanted you to be so free that you would live your life for other people.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“You're paved in my heart like an old road. Like the pebbles in a pebble field, dirt in dirt, dust in dust, cobwebs in cobwebs.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“How can you live without trusting people? There are more people who are good than people who are bad!”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“إن تلك الأم هي الشخص الذي تلجأين إليه هندما يتملكك اليأس حيال شيء ما في هذه المدينه.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“بعد أن اختفت، أصبحت حاضرة في حياتكم، و كأنكم تستطيعون مد أيديكم إليها و لمسها”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“You left this house whenever you wanted to, and came back at your whim, and you never once thought that your wife would be the one to leave.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“If there were no sea between you and me...there wouldn't be this painful goodbye”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“كيف يسع المرء أن يفعل ما يحلو له فقط؟ هناك أشياء يجب على المرء فعلها سواء أأحبّ ذلك أم لا”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“إن معظم الأشياء في العالم لا تأتي غير متوقعة إن فكر المرء فيها بعناية. فحتى الأشياء التي قد يظنها غير اعتيادية، هي في الواقع أشياء كان من المقرر لها أن تحدث. وإن صادف المرء أحداثاً غير اعتيادية، فهذا يعني غالباً أنه لايفكر في الأمور ملياً.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Until last fall, you thought you knew your mom well-what your Mom like, what you had to do to appease her when she was angry, what she wanted to hear... But last fall, your belief that you knew her was shattered. You went for a visit without announcing it beforehand, and you discovered that you had become a guest...Maybe you'd become a guest even before then, when you moved to the city. After you left home, your mom never scolded you. Before, Mom would reprimand you harshly if you did something even remotely wrong.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.…”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“إن كلمة "ماما" مريحة وتنطوي على توسل خفي: من فضلك اعتني بي. من فضلك توقفي عن الصراخ في وجهي وربتي على رأسي بحنان. من فضلك قفي إلي جانبي سواء أكنت على خطأ أم على صواب.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“فلم يخطر ببالي في تلك الأيام قط أن أفكر في حبي للعمل في المطبخ أو عدمه. فإن أعددت قدراً كبيراً من الأرز و واحدةً أصغر من الحساء، فلم أفكر في مقدار التعب الذي يهدّ جسمي، بل شعرا بالسعادة لأن هذا الطعام سيدخل أفواه أطفالي، إنك على الأرجح لا تتخيلين الآن مايعنيه هذا ، ولكننا في ذلك الوقت من الماضي كنت دائمي القلق من أن ينفد الطعام منا. فقد شكل تأمين الطعام والبقاء على قيد الحياة أهم غاية لنا. أخبرتك أمك وهي تبتسم أنها تعتبر تلك الأيام أسعد أيام حياتها.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“وبعد أن أختفت فقط، أصبح وجودها ملموساً في حياتك وكأنك تستطيع أن تمدّ يدك إليها وتلمسها.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“That your wife truly loved the world, and that you loved her.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
“When I was tired, I went over to you and opened your fingers. Touched your toes. When I did that, I felt energized. When I first put shoes on you, I was really excited. When you toddled over to me, I laughed so much; even if someone had spilled out a heap of gold and silver and jewels in front of me, I wouldn’t have laughed like that.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, quote from Please Look After Mom
Kyung-Sook Shin
Born place: in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province, Korea, Republic of
Born date January 12, 1963
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“June is a bad month for bugs in Alaska; generally it takes a good five or ten knots of breeze to keep them at bay, but even then they will tend to hover in your lee, waiting for the wind to die. Mosquitoes swarm so thickly up there that they can, like clouds, briefly form recognizable shapes. This is probably the only circumstance in nature where it is possible to look downwind and see a shadow of oneself infused with one's own blood.”
― John Vaillant, quote from The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
“He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story—the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Against the Day
“[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.
'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.”
― Denis Johnson, quote from Jesus' Son
“Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know.”
― E. Nesbit, quote from Five Children and It
The Power of One
The Wise Man's Fear
Things Fall Apart
The Son of Neptune
The Magician's Nephe...
MiddlemarchBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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