Top 90 Han Kang Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals. –.”

— Han Kang

52. “Why are we walking in the dark, let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.”

— Han Kang

53. “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

54. “The body that had caused me such shame was going to be devoured by the flames – that was no cause for regret. I wanted to pare myself down to a simpler existence, just as I had while I’d still been alive. I was determined not to be afraid of anything.”

— Han Kang

55. “Perhaps, at some point, Yeong-hye had simply let fall the slender thread which had kept her connected with everyday life. During the past insomniac months, In-hye had sometimes felt as though she was living in a state of total chaos. If it hadn’t been for Ji-woo – if it hadn’t been for the sense of responsibility she felt towards him – perhaps she too might have relinquished her grip on that thread.”

— Han Kang

56. “Were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line, she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend. Bringing, perhaps, the realisation that nothing of that past could now be glimpsed were she to cast a quick glance over her shoulder.”

— Han Kang

57. “Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.”

— Han Kang

58. “He didn’t know if her desperate efforts to be understanding and considerate were a good or bad thing. Perhaps it was all down to him being self-centered and irresponsible. But right now he found his wife’s patience and desire to do the right thing stifling, which made him still more inclined to see it as a flaw in her character.”

— Han Kang

59. “I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.”

— Han Kang

60. “The pain feels like a hole swallowing her up, a source of intense fear and yet, at the same time, a strange, quiet peace.”

— Han Kang

61. “Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.”

— Han Kang

62. “She watches the streaks of rain lashing the window, with the untouched steadiness unique to those accustomed to solitude.”

— Han Kang

63. “As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families – they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence.”

— Han Kang

64. “It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanking, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.”

— Han Kang

65. “You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.”

— Han Kang

66. “The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.”

— Han Kang

67. “But at the same time you know that if a time like that spring were to come around again, and even knowing what you know now, you might well end up making a similar choice to the one you’d made then.”

— Han Kang

68. “Now and then, all of this struck me as being not so much ridiculous as faintly ominous. What if, by chance, these early-stage symptoms didn’t pass? If the hints at hysteria, delusion, weak nerves and so on, that I thought I could detect in what she said, ended up leading to something more?”

— Han Kang

69. “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”

— Han Kang

70. “His silence had the heavy mass of rock and the tenacious resistance of rubber, particularly when his art wasn’t going well.”

— Han Kang

71. “Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”

— Han Kang

72. “It melted in the rain... it all melted... I’d been just about to go down into the earth. There was nothing else for it if I wanted to turn myself upside down again, you see.”

— Han Kang

73. “I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.”

— Han Kang

74. “Quietly, she breathes in. The trees by the side of the road are blazing, green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage. In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something. The look in her eyes is dark and insistent.”

— Han Kang

75. “Gripped by this familiar shame, she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. It was that which had tormented her for the past five years – that she could still feel hunger, still salivate at the sight of food.”

— Han Kang

76. “Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed.”

— Han Kang

77. “Dong-ho, I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.”

— Han Kang

78. “Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses?”

— Han Kang

79. “Never before had he set eyes on such a body, a body which said so much and yet was no more than itself.”

— Han Kang

80. “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.”

— Han Kang

81. “There is something battened down about the woods in this torrential rain, like a huge animal suppressing a roar.”

— Han Kang

82. “If there was a time when he would want to see her again, it would certainly be then. When both youth and flesh would have fallen away. When there would be no time left for desire. When only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.”

— Han Kang

83. “You said, This thing we call life mustn’t ever become something endured.”

— Han Kang

84. “Dreams overlaid with dreams, a palimpsest of horror.”

— Han Kang

85. “Unable to fathom what on earth it could be, this thing so cold, so hostile. This vanishing fragility, this oppressive weight of beauty.”

— Han Kang

86. “The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?” You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you’d wanted to ask.”

— Han Kang

87. “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

88. “At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd.”

— Han Kang

89. “Yeong-hye doesn’t vomit; instead, she opens her eyes. Her black pupils fix on In-hye. What is stirring behind those eyes? What is she harboring inside her, beyond the reach of her sister’s imagination? What terror, what anger, what agony, what hell?”

— Han Kang

90. “Is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave us moved?”

— Han Kang

91. “When only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.”

— Han Kang

92. “A person had attacked her own body right in front of his eyes, tried to hack at it like it was a piece of meat; her blood had soaked his white shirt, mingling with his sweat and gradually drying to a dark brown stain.”

— Han Kang

93. “All the same, there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad. Mine, on the other hand, crushed out of shape beneath a tower of others, was shameful, detestable. From that moment on, I was filled with hatred for my body. Our bodies, tossed there like lumps of meat. Our filthy, rotting faces, reeking in the sun.”

— Han Kang

94. “That human beings are also constructed of something other than flesh and muscle seemed to her like a strange stroke of luck.”

— Han Kang