“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
See more on GoodReads
“Music”—he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger—“music speaks for the soul because words are too small.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from The Given Day
“Phillip look into Ray's eyes. He saw compassion and hope. And he saw himself mirrored back, bleeding in a dirty gutter on a street where life was worth less than a dime bag.
Sick, tired, petrified, Phillip dropped his head into his hands.
"What's the point?"
"You're the point, son." Ray ran his hand over Phillip's hair. "You're the point.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Inner Harbor
“I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from The Wasteland, Prufrock and Other Poems
“You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you."
[...]
Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to comer from his mouth or throat. "You are intelligent," he said. "That's the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we've found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics."
"What's the second characteristic?"
"You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as problem, but took pride in it or din not notice it at all..." The rattling sounded again.”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Dawn
“All of them are the same type; girls with overprocessed hair and too much makeup and way too much access to Daddy’s credit cards. Girls who, if you took away the designer labels, hair dye and cover-up, wouldn’t be more than average-looking, but with all that stuff look too plastic to be pretty.”
― Hannah Harrington, quote from Speechless
Julie and Julia: 365...
Saving Grace
The Interludes
Coming Up for Air
Furiously Happy: A F...
Queen of BabbleBookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
