Top 90 Han Kang Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I’m fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.”

— Han Kang

2. “It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like.”

— Han Kang

3. “Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves – living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they’d briefly managed to forget.”

— Han Kang

4. “The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.”

— Han Kang

5. “I’m not an animal anymore, sister,” she said, first scanning the empty ward as if about to disclose a momentous secret. “I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight.”

— Han Kang

6. “She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”

— Han Kang

7. “I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”

— Han Kang

8. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping quiet, after all, hadn’t women traditionally been expected to be demure and restrained?”

— Han Kang

9. “Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.”

— Han Kang

10. “Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered – is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”

— Han Kang

11. “The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”

— Han Kang

12. “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.”

— Han Kang

13. “Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”

— Han Kang

14. “Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay. Still okay. So why do they keep on shrinking? Not even round anymore. Why? Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening–what am I going to gouge.”

— Han Kang

15. “When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there’s simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.”

— Han Kang

16. “She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.”

— Han Kang

17. “Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.”

— Han Kang

18. “This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.”

— Han Kang

19. “The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had never done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm.”

— Han Kang

20. “A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?”

— Han Kang

21. “Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness.”

— Han Kang

22. “This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.”

— Han Kang

23. “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there.”

— Han Kang

24. “There are certain memories that remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is colored by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.”

— Han Kang

25. “Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?”

— Han Kang

26. “Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.”

— Han Kang

27. “She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.”

— Han Kang

28. “Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.”

— Han Kang

29. “Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.”

— Han Kang

30. “I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t realised was there.”

— Han Kang

31. “There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. Sleet falls as she walks these streets, holding this knowledge inside her. Sleet that leaves cheeks and eyebrows heavy with moisture. Everything passes.”

— Han Kang

32. “Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.”

— Han Kang

33. “I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race.”

— Han Kang

34. “Perhaps the only things he truly loved were his images – those he’d filmed, or then again, perhaps only those he had yet to film.”

— Han Kang

35. “Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.”

— Han Kang

36. “I was convinced that there was more going on here than a simple case of vegetarianism.”

— Han Kang

37. “I looked on in silence as my face blackened and swelled, my features turned into festering ulcers, the contours that had defined me, that had given me clear edges, crumbled into ambiguity, leaving nothing that could be recognized as me.”

— Han Kang

38. “It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.”

— Han Kang

39. “Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment.”

— Han Kang

40. “If only one’s eyes weren’t visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one’s eyes from the world.”

— Han Kang

41. “It seemed enough for her to just deal with whatever it was that came her way, calmly and without fuss. Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time.”

— Han Kang

42. “Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.”

— Han Kang

43. “Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time.”

— Han Kang

44. “Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.”

— Han Kang

45. “This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her – rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.”

— Han Kang

46. “I don’t know you,” she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. “So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.”

— Han Kang

47. “It seemed enough for her to just deal with whatever it was that came her way, calmly and without fuss.”

— Han Kang

48. “For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she’d so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted.”

— Han Kang

49. “The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior.”

— Han Kang

50. “Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.”

— Han Kang