Top 80 Michelle Zauner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Cooking my mother’s food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. Food was an unspoken language between us, had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground.”

— Michelle Zauner

2. “Stop shaking your leg; you’ll shake the luck out.”

— Michelle Zauner

3. “Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.”

— Michelle Zauner

4. “For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”

— Michelle Zauner

5. “I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone whole.”

— Michelle Zauner

6. “There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.”

— Michelle Zauner

7. “For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me. Tears streamed down my face and when I looked over, my mother was crying too. We held each other, letting ourselves sob deeply onto each other’s T-shirts. Neither of us had ever watched Law and Order or even knew who this actress was, but it was as if we were watching my future play out, the pain I’d keep with me for a lifetime.”

— Michelle Zauner

8. “Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime.”

— Michelle Zauner

9. “I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. If they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food. Which ones weren’t able to fly back home this year, or for the past ten years? Which ones are like me, missing the people who are gone from their lives forever?”

— Michelle Zauner

10. “My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.”

— Michelle Zauner

11. “How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.”

— Michelle Zauner

12. “Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.”

— Michelle Zauner

13. “Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem – constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations – I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”

— Michelle Zauner

14. “In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”

— Michelle Zauner

15. “He would have his own grief to confront, but he swallowed it for now. When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.”

— Michelle Zauner

16. “Unlike the second languages I attempted to learn in high school, there are Korean words I inherently understand without ever having learned their definition. There is no momentary translation that mediates the transition from one language to another. Parts of Korean just exist somewhere as part of my psyche – words imbued with their pure meaning, not their English substitutes.”

— Michelle Zauner

17. “I want to tell him how much I miss my mother. How he should be kind to his mom, remember that life is fragile and she could be gone at any moment.”

— Michelle Zauner

18. “Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.”

— Michelle Zauner

19. “Every time I ate well or bowed correctly to my elders, my relatives would say, “Aigo yeppeu.” “Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.”

— Michelle Zauner

20. “When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.”

— Michelle Zauner

21. “Without my mother, did I have any real claim to Korea or her family?”

— Michelle Zauner

22. “That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you.”

— Michelle Zauner

23. “We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.”

— Michelle Zauner

24. “I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.”

— Michelle Zauner

25. “You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.”

— Michelle Zauner

26. “Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.”

— Michelle Zauner

27. “The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”

— Michelle Zauner

28. “Over time our conversations became a lot like explaining a movie to someone who has walked in on the last thirty minutes.”

— Michelle Zauner

29. “If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss.”

— Michelle Zauner

30. “I can hardly speak Korean, but in H Mart it feels like I’m fluent.”

— Michelle Zauner

31. “There will usually be a pseudo-French bakery with weak coffee, bubble tea, and an array of glowing pastries that always look much better than they taste.”

— Michelle Zauner

32. “I didn’t know the comforting words she probably longed for the way I long for them now. I didn’t know then the type of effort it can take to simply move.”

— Michelle Zauner

33. “My own weight loss made me feel tied to her. I wanted to embody a physical warning – that if she began to disappear, I would disappear too.”

— Michelle Zauner

34. “Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other.”

— Michelle Zauner

35. “I would think of how my mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her very own way of saying, “You are what you eat.”

— Michelle Zauner

36. “And what was the Korean word for “little axe”?”

— Michelle Zauner

37. “It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”

— Michelle Zauner

38. “I hadn’t believed in a god since I was about ten and still envisioned Mr. Rogers when I prayed, but the years that followed my mother’s passing were suspiciously charmed.”

— Michelle Zauner

39. “I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best – my father, Nami, and me – had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.”

— Michelle Zauner

40. “And that she was glad I had finally found a place where I belonged.”

— Michelle Zauner

41. “Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give.”

— Michelle Zauner

42. “Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”

— Michelle Zauner

43. “Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing.”

— Michelle Zauner

44. “To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.”

— Michelle Zauner

45. “My family lauded my bravery, I radiated with pride, and something about that moment set me on a path. I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature’s greatest gifts.”

— Michelle Zauner

46. “If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way.”

— Michelle Zauner

47. “Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”

— Michelle Zauner

48. “But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor – blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.”

— Michelle Zauner

49. “Gwaenchanh-a, gwaenchanh-a,” she said. It’s okay, it’s okay. Korean words so familiar, the gentle coo I’d heard my whole life that assured me whatever ache was at hand would pass. Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden.”

— Michelle Zauner

50. “She was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those to seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book.”

— Michelle Zauner