Top 100 Min Jin Lee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Fill your mind with knowledge – it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.”

— Min Jin Lee

2. “History has failed us, but no matter.”

— Min Jin Lee

3. “It’s possible that the college prizes misled me to believe that I could publish a novel immediately after quitting the law. However, the more I studied fiction, the more I realized that writing novels required rigorous discipline and mastery, no different than the study of engineering or classical sculpture. I wanted to get formal training.”

— Min Jin Lee

4. “Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”

— Min Jin Lee

5. “I’m not a good man, but I’m not a bad one, either.”

— Min Jin Lee

6. “Learn everything. Fill your mind with knowledge – it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.” Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.”

— Min Jin Lee

7. “No one is clean. Living makes you dirty.”

— Min Jin Lee

8. “If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie was this steady, beating organ.”

— Min Jin Lee

9. “We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.”

— Min Jin Lee

10. “I try not to cry, because it doesn’t seem to make any difference. And whenever I do, I shut my eyes to make it stop.”

— Min Jin Lee

11. “You are very brave, Noa. Much, much braver than me. Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”

— Min Jin Lee

12. “The penalties incurred for the mistakes you made had to be paid out in full to the members of your family.”

— Min Jin Lee

13. “A woman’s lot is to suffer.”

— Min Jin Lee

14. “Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know. You’re becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life – but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman – just ourselves.”

— Min Jin Lee

15. “You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”

— Min Jin Lee

16. “And Mozasu? He is Baek Isak’s son? He doesn’t look like me.” Sunja.”

— Min Jin Lee

17. “Neither had realized the loneliness each had lived with for such a long time until the loneliness was interrupted by genuine affection.”

— Min Jin Lee

18. “Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow, the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe such cruel ideals.”

— Min Jin Lee

19. “A snake that sheds its skin is still a snake.”

— Min Jin Lee

20. “Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.”

— Min Jin Lee

21. “There was more to being something than just blood.”

— Min Jin Lee

22. “It’s a filthy world, Solomon. No one is clean. Living makes you dirty.”

— Min Jin Lee

23. “Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes-there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game?”

— Min Jin Lee

24. “Etsuko had failed in this important way – she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.”

— Min Jin Lee

25. “Life makes you pay... everybody pays something.”

— Min Jin Lee

26. “People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.” Sunja.”

— Min Jin Lee

27. “In the end, your belly was your emperor.”

— Min Jin Lee

28. “I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean – or not Korean enough.”

— Min Jin Lee

29. “Her father had taught her not to judge people on such shallow points: What a man wore or owned had nothing to do with his heart and character.”

— Min Jin Lee

30. “Ah, the belly has a better memory than the heart!”

— Min Jin Lee

31. “People are awful. Drink some beer.” Haruki.”

— Min Jin Lee

32. “Man, life’s going to keep pushing you around, but you have to keep playing.”

— Min Jin Lee

33. “It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two – her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph’s strokes.”

— Min Jin Lee

34. “But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.”

— Min Jin Lee

35. “He was suffering, and in a way, he could manage that; but he had caused others to suffer, and he did not know why he had to live now and recall the series of terrible choices that had not looked so terrible at the time. Was that how it was for most people?”

— Min Jin Lee

36. “You people work together to make sure nothing ever changes. Sho ga nai. Sho ga nai. That’s all I ever hear.”

— Min Jin Lee

37. “It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes – so this is how she became a woman.”

— Min Jin Lee

38. “Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism. But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much.”

— Min Jin Lee

39. “She would have uprooted herself to have seen the world with him, and now she was seeing it without him.”

— Min Jin Lee

40. “Even if there were hundred bad Japanese, if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement.”

— Min Jin Lee

41. “It was always better to say less.”

— Min Jin Lee

42. “What did Joseph say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery when he saw them again? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

— Min Jin Lee

43. “For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life-but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard.”

— Min Jin Lee

44. “His Presbyterian minster father had believed in a divine design, and Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn’t control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope.”

— Min Jin Lee

45. “You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination.”

— Min Jin Lee

46. “For this was love, wasn’t it? To have someone clean up after you, to think about you when you were sick, to not walk away when there was nothing to be gained for the labor required.”

— Min Jin Lee

47. “And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way – she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.”

— Min Jin Lee

48. “She has loved him, and she could not bear the thought of him being gone form this life.”

— Min Jin Lee

49. “The Bible said that a wise person must rein in his tongue. Not everything you wanted to say should be said.”

— Min Jin Lee

50. “She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn’t himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated.”

— Min Jin Lee