Top 80 Michelle Zauner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My mom was the only one in her family who didn’t practice Christianity. She believed in some higher power but didn’t like the cultishness of organized religion, even when it was what knit most of the Korean community.”

— Michelle Zauner

52. “Food was how my mother expressed her love.”

— Michelle Zauner

53. “I never thought I was going to get married,” I said. “But having witnessed for the past six months what it means to keep the promise to be there for someone in sickness and in health, I find myself here, understanding.”

— Michelle Zauner

54. “At the Chinese restaurant, Nami Emo would reserve a room with a big table and a gigantic glass lazy Susan on which turned small porcelain pitchers of vinegar and soy sauce with a marble button to ring for service. We’d order decadent jjajangmyeon noodles, dumpling after dumpling served in rich broth, tangsuyuk pork with mushrooms and peppers, and yusanseul, gelatinous sea cucumber with squid, shrimp, and zucchini.”

— Michelle Zauner

55. “It used to be so clear to me, the difference between living and dying.”

— Michelle Zauner

56. “For the first time it occurred to me that what she sought in my face might be fading. I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, to make sense of me.”

— Michelle Zauner

57. “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. She was the only person in the world who could tell me that things would all work out somehow. The eye of the storm, a calm witness to the wreckage spinning out into its end.”

— Michelle Zauner

58. “I could almost feel in the embrace that my concerns had been her concerns, my pain had been her pain.”

— Michelle Zauner

59. “I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.”

— Michelle Zauner

60. “Save your tears for when your mother dies.”

— Michelle Zauner

61. “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. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate. We bring the haul back to our dorm rooms or our suburban kitchens, and we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey.”

— Michelle Zauner

62. “I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous.”

— Michelle Zauner

63. “But, most days, I knew it was the ultimate display of a Korean woman’s tenderness, and I cherished that love. A love I’d do anything to have back.”

— Michelle Zauner

64. “She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions.”

— Michelle Zauner

65. “I couldn’t comprehend then the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss.”

— Michelle Zauner

66. “I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn’t eat seafood, if you had a large appetite.”

— Michelle Zauner

67. “When you were a child, you always used to cling to me. Everywhere we went,” my mother whispered, struggling to get the words out. “And now that you’re older, here you are – still clinging to me.”

— Michelle Zauner

68. “A cosmically cruel fate for a woman who’d never known romantic love. Her last words were “Where are we going?”

— Michelle Zauner

69. “She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.”

— Michelle Zauner

70. “I think Halmoni and Eunmi and your mom is very happy,” Nami said. She flipped the heart charm on the necklace I gave her so it faced forward. “They are all in heaven together, playing hwatu and drinking soju, happy we are here together.”

— Michelle Zauner

71. “I’m just waiting for you to give this up,” she said.”

— Michelle Zauner

72. “We scolded her, saying if she didn’t work harder to try to keep food down, she wouldn’t get better.”

— Michelle Zauner

73. “Even when he’s here he doesn’t know how to take care of me at all.”

— Michelle Zauner

74. “Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit besides girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters.”

— Michelle Zauner

75. “We had tried to choose living over dying and it had turned out to be a horrible mistake.”

— Michelle Zauner

76. “When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.”

— Michelle Zauner

77. “It felt wrong to talk to anyone, to smile or laugh or eat again knowing that she was dead.”

— Michelle Zauner

78. “If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way. That if we had to be ripped apart right at our turning point, just when things were really starting to get good, the least god could do was make a few of her daughter’s pipe dreams come true.”

— Michelle Zauner

79. “If this is something you could see yourself doing in five years and we don’t just do it now, I don’t think I will be able to forgive you.”

— Michelle Zauner

80. “When I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.”

— Michelle Zauner

81. “It was the year her life ended and mine fell apart.”

— Michelle Zauner

82. “There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”

— Michelle Zauner

83. “She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized. The time I was born, my unborn cravings, the first book I read. The formation of every characteristic. Every ailment and little victory. She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.”

— Michelle Zauner

84. “I wanted a place where I could fall against the earth, collapse on the ground, and in the various seasons weep in the grass and dirt, not stand upright before display shelves as if I were visiting a bank or a library.”

— Michelle Zauner

85. “I wondered if the shopkeepers thought that Nami was my mother. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing. Each of us was role-playing in a way, soft substitutes for the dead we wanted so desperately to revive.”

— Michelle Zauner

86. “The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed.”

— Michelle Zauner

87. “I yearned for my mother to speak to me but tried to appear stoic, knowing full well my constitution was much weaker than hers.”

— Michelle Zauner

88. “How he should be kind to his mom, remember that life is fragile and she could be gone at any moment.”

— Michelle Zauner

89. “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 who seek to earn and create.”

— Michelle Zauner