Top 30 Frances Cha Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”

— Frances Cha

2. “She doesn’t understand that I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own.”

— Frances Cha

3. “Why would you want to bring more children into this world so that they can suffer and be stressed their entire lives? And they’ll disappoint you and you will want to die. And you’ll be poor.”

— Frances Cha

4. “But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.”

— Frances Cha

5. “Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.”

— Frances Cha

6. “I want them to think I’m stupid,” she said to me once. “No expectation is nice. It gives you a lot of time to think.”

— Frances Cha

7. “It’s basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself.”

— Frances Cha

8. “Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”

— Frances Cha

9. “You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married – that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections.”

— Frances Cha

10. “But now, I think perhaps that’s precisely why he likes me – I am a welcome change because with me he can play the role of the provider. There is a limit to how much Korean men are willing to endure female money, especially if they are wealthy themselves.”

— Frances Cha

11. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep at night and wake up rich every day?”

— Frances Cha

12. “In a way, I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, and I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach.”

— Frances Cha

13. “It was only recently that I understood they were now worried that no normal man would marry me. The idea that I would never experience motherhood was so distressing that it unleashed a separate wave of guilt for their not having given me siblings. “We thought we were too old,” said my mother, twisting her hands. “We were selfish, and now you will have no one when you die.”

— Frances Cha

14. “The only gentlemen I ever see are in those dramas on TV. Those men are kind. They protect you and cry and stand up to their families for you.”

— Frances Cha

15. “I know, because I was in love with a poor man once. He could not pay to spend time with me and I could not afford to spend time with him.”

— Frances Cha

16. “In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life – if you live through it, that is.”

— Frances Cha

17. “I am glad then that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time.”

— Frances Cha

18. “Unfortunately, the truth is that even apart from her asymmetrical eyelids, Sujin’s face is too square for her to ever be considered pretty in the true Korean sense. Her lower jaw also protrudes too much.”

— Frances Cha

19. “Long feathery eyelashes have been planted along her tattooed eye line, and she does routine light therapy on her skin, which glistens cloudy white, like skim milk. Earlier, she was waxing on about the benefits of lotus leaf masks and ceramide supplements for budding neck lines. The only unaltered part of her is surprisingly her hair, which unfolds like a dark river down her back.”

— Frances Cha

20. “I have no desire to stay past midnight every night for a company that treats me like an ant to be crushed by the heel of a shoe.”

— Frances Cha

21. “Sometimes, when he is holding me and I feel like I am liquid in his arms, I wonder if anything else in my life will seem real after this. It is as if I traveled beyond the earth and reached out and touched a burning star, and it is both unendurable and terrifying. I am glad, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time.”

— Frances Cha

22. “For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else. That’s just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid-fire questions the minute they meet you. Which neighborhood do you live in? Where did you go to school? Where do you work? Do you know so-and-so? They pinpoint where you are on the national scale of status, then spit you out in a heartbeat.”

— Frances Cha

23. “Speaking of those hoity-toity doctors and pharmacists who run their clinics in districts like Miari and profit off the working girls and their sicknesses – they are no better than the gutter trash who come around selling lubricants and “handmade” dresses to the girls to wear in our glass showrooms that light up red in the night.”

— Frances Cha

24. “I WILL NOT come out of this with nothing.”

— Frances Cha

25. “It makes me feel so proud when I hear about you. It’s a strange thing.”

— Frances Cha

26. “In New York, you can talk to anyone about anything at any time and have a conversation so long you’ll fall a little in love with that person, and then never see them again.”

— Frances Cha

27. “The thought of you alone in life, no children, that is what is making me old and sick.”

— Frances Cha

28. “I AM GLAD, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time. In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life – if you live through it, that is.”

— Frances Cha

29. “I was still learning the appropriate levels of reaction in this world. Things I should not express shock of delight at. Things I should be overjoyed about. I was not supposed to be amazed by the unusual beauty of the apartment, but thick-crust pizza called for riots.”

— Frances Cha

30. “Men these days are actually much better than previous generations – the ones who used to bring mistresses into the house and make their wives feed and care for their bastard children.”

— Frances Cha

31. “You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married – that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genres of all women in this country.”

— Frances Cha

32. “OFTEN WHEN I am in a place that is crowded and loud, I look around at all the people who are talking and I think about how much of their being is concentrated in their voices, and how I am living a fraction of that life. And then I play a useless game with myself – would it have been preferable to have lost my hearing or sight instead? The sickening self-pity sharpens when I actually listen to what people are talking about.”

— Frances Cha

33. “There is something about happy people – their eyes are clear and their shoulders hang lower on their bodies.”

— Frances Cha

34. “Us girls, we have been trained for years: “Say that you were the one who wanted to sleep with the customer. You just wanted some money. Got it?” So the girl gets jailed and fined for prostitution, and vilified in society as someone who does this for easy money. The girls who die in the process – the ones who are beaten to death or the ones who kill themselves – they don’t even make the news.”

— Frances Cha