Top 35 Kyung-sook Shin Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “If there were no sea between you and me... there wouldn’t be this painful goodbye.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

2. “Taking his hand and letting it go was my way of saying goodbye.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

3. “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

4. “You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?”

— Kyung-sook Shin

5. “Time is always bearing down on us; nevertheless, had I understood in my youth that we can never relive the same moment twice, things might have turned out differently. Had I understood that, I would never have said goodbye to someone, and someone else might still be alive. If only I had known that the moment you think everything has ended, something new is beginning.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

6. “You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again. It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

7. “Leave her be,” he said. “She’ll stop when she’s ready.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

8. “History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface... Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined... About making a mess of things, all over again.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

9. “It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

10. “If I opened my mouth to say a single word, all of the other expired words would have followed and spilled to the ground, as if the string that held them together had snapped.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

11. “She said that cats were more attached to places than to people. And that was why cats are often found in abandoned houses.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

12. “Try thinking of sleep as a kind of rebirth.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

13. “I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else. Considering the way we are living right now, if we were young at the end of our lives instead, then maybe our dreams could come true.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

14. “Back then, he and I were always waiting for each other.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

15. “Maybe if we hug a hundred strangers, he said, something will change.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

16. “We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

17. “Father wept as he recalled that one spring day, when they shared for lunch the scabbard fish that Mom had cooked in the morning and, stomachs full, napped together, stretched out. He said that back then he didn’t know that this was happiness.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

18. “He said that the plane was too fast, that his body had arrived fast. That he was just ill because his soul could not keep pace with the speed of the plane and was still on its way home, and he would feel better once his soul had caught up.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

19. “I’m trying to think about what I can do. But instead all that comes to mind are the things I can’t do. How do we judge truth and goodness? Where are justice and righteousness hiding? A society that is violent or corrupt prohibits mutual communication. A society that fears communication is unable to solve any problem. It looks for someone to shift the responsibility to and turns even more violent.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

20. “I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

21. “You didn’t want to pick at your wound. There were worse things in life.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

22. “A house is such a strange thing. Everything else gets more worn when people handle it, and sometimes you can feel a person’s poison if you get too close to him, but that’s not what happens to a house. Even a good house falls apart quickly when nobody stops by. A house is alive only when there are people living in it, brushing against it, staying in it.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

23. “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

24. “I guess saying goodbye makes us reach out for those we would ordinarily ignore. Maybe we care about them more, too, when it is time to part.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

25. “All the things that have happened are actually in the present, that old things are all mixed in with current things, and future things are combined with old things; it’s just that we can’t feel it.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

26. “In this age when words have lost their value, this age that is therefore dominated by violent words, by words swollen and yellowed with starvation, I have lost the will to speak any more of words. My despair over words is not an admittance of defeat in life.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

27. “I will let go of you now. You were my secret. You were in my life, someone whose presence would never be guessed by anyone who knew me. 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 that 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

28. “Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?”

— Kyung-sook Shin

29. “I just want to go with you, Mom.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

30. “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

31. “Even though Mom’s missing, summer will come and fall will come again and winter will come, like this. And I’ll be living in a world without Mom.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

32. “He tells us life is beautiful. Did he also tell us what made it beautiful? I cannot remember. He simply said, “Life is a beautiful thing.” What its beauty will bring us, and what its beauty will take from us, he does not say. Simply beautiful, is all he says.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

33. “They say that if you take in a person he will betray you, and if you take in a dog he will pay you back.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

34. “All the relationships in the world are two-way, not determined by one side.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

35. “If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife. Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

36. “You are that kind of person. The kind of person who has to do everything with your own hands.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

37. “When was the last time you’d told Mom about something that had happened to you? At a certain point, the conversations between you and Mom became simplified. Even that was not done face to face, but by telephone.”

— Kyung-sook Shin

38. “The eldest brother has to be dignified. He has to be the role model. If the eldest brother goes the wrong way, his siblings will go that way, too.”

— Kyung-sook Shin