Top 100 Min Jin Lee Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.”

— Min Jin Lee

52. “Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?”

— Min Jin Lee

53. “Trying to save money while paying medical bills was like pouring oil into a broken jar.”

— Min Jin Lee

54. “Listen, if people don’t like you, it’s not always your fault. My brother told me that.”

— Min Jin Lee

55. “Yes, of course. If you love anyone, you cannot help but share his suffering. If we love our Lord, not just admire him or fear him or want things from him, we must recognize his feelings; he must be in anguish over our sins. We must understand this anguish. The Lord suffers with us. He suffers like us. It is a consolation to know this. To know that we are not in fact alone in our suffering.”

— Min Jin Lee

56. “For people like us, home doesn’t exist.”

— Min Jin Lee

57. “She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.”

— Min Jin Lee

58. “The Weird Sisters is a chronicle of real women, because it tells the truths of sisters. Eleanor Brown has written a compelling novel about love, despair and birth order – the themes the Bard himself had claimed and burnished.”

— Min Jin Lee

59. “The wife you choose will be your personal and social mirror.”

— Min Jin Lee

60. “She wished she had something like baseball that she could talk about with her daughter – a safe subject they could visit without subtext or aggression.”

— Min Jin Lee

61. “In life, there was so much insult and injury, and she had no choice but to collect what was hers.”

— Min Jin Lee

62. “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

63. “What surprised him was that as he felt closer to death, he felt the terror of death, its very finality. There were so many things he had failed to do. There were even more things he should never have done.”

— Min Jin Lee

64. “He never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to him that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.”

— Min Jin Lee

65. “My life is nothing. It wouldn’t have any meaning without putting it to good use. Don’t you think?”

— Min Jin Lee

66. “He walked until he couldn’t hear her scream his name anymore. He walked rigidly and calmly, not believing that a person you loved – yes he has loved her – could end up being someone you never knew.”

— Min Jin Lee

67. “Beyond the dailiness, there had been moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too, even in this ajumma’s life. Even if no one knew, it was true.”

— Min Jin Lee

68. “Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness.”

— Min Jin Lee

69. “All landowners who were foolish enough to stick around were shot. Communists see people only in simple categories.”

— Min Jin Lee

70. “Japan would save China by bringing technological advancements to a rural economy; Japan would end poverty in Asia and make it prosper; Japan would protect Asia from the pernicious hands of Western imperialism; and only Germany, Japan’s true and fearless ally, was fighting the evils of the West.”

— Min Jin Lee

71. “All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer – suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother – die suffering. Go-saeng – the word made her sick.”

— Min Jin Lee

72. “It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes – so this was how she became a woman. Without Hansu and Isak and Noa, there wouldn’t have been this pilgrimage to this land. Beyond the dailiness, there had been moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too, even in this ajumma’s life. Even if no one knew, it was true.”

— Min Jin Lee

73. “Love for God, he’d thought, should come naturally and not out of fear of punishment.”

— Min Jin Lee

74. “There was consolation: The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned. Sometimes, she could be in front of a train kiosk or the window of a bookstore, and she could feel Noa’s small hand when he was a boy, and she would close her eyes and think of his sweet grassy smell and remember that he had always tried his best. At those moments, it was good to be alone to hold on to him.”

— Min Jin Lee

75. “But people will always say things. They will always say terrible things, no matter what. It’s normal for me. I’m nobody.”

— Min Jin Lee

76. “Although, if you like everything you read, I can’t take you seriously. Perhaps you didn’t think about these books long enough.”

— Min Jin Lee

77. “At this point in the course, everyone in the room despised Akiko, but suddenly he admired her courage to think so differently and to suggest such a difficult truth. He felt lucky to be at a university and not in most other settings, where the person in charge was always right. Nevertheless, until he really listened to Akiko disagree with the professor, he had not thought for himself fully, and it had never occurred to him to disagree in public.”

— Min Jin Lee

78. “He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope.”

— Min Jin Lee

79. “Don’t do what I do but what you think is right. But whatever you do, you can’t keep yourself from getting hurt. The heart doesn’t seem to work that way.”

— Min Jin Lee

80. “From the moment she’d met him, she’d felt his presence all around her.”

— Min Jin Lee

81. “The world was cruel with its rations.”

— Min Jin Lee

82. “Your grandmother Sunja and great-aunt Kyunghee visit me on Saturdays. Did you know that? They pray for me, too. I don’t understand the Jesus stuff, but it’s something holy to have people touch you when you’re sick. The nurses here are afraid to touch me. Your grandmother Sunja holds my hands, and your great-aunt Kyunghee puts cool towels on my head when I get too hot. They’re kind to me, though I’m a bad person –.”

— Min Jin Lee

83. “It was much smaller than her own, but everyone seemed closer, as if each member were organically attached to one seamless body, whereas her enormous extended family felt like cheerfully mismatched Lego bricks in a large bucket.”

— Min Jin Lee

84. “The peasants knew that a spoiled son did more harm to a family than a dead one, and they kept themselves from indulging him too much.”

— Min Jin Lee

85. “Men have choices that women don’t.”

— Min Jin Lee

86. “After losing four of his children and his wife to cholera five years ago, Shin found that he could not speak much about loss. Everything a person said sounded glib and foolish.”

— Min Jin Lee

87. “It’s not that you don’t understand, it’s that you don’t like it.”

— Min Jin Lee

88. “As far as he was concerned, the whole religion thing was a racket for overeducated men who didn’t want to do real work.”

— Min Jin Lee

89. “The Lord continues to be committed to us even when we sin. He continues to love us. In some ways, the nature of his love for us resembles an enduring marriage, or how a father or mother may love a misbegotten child. Hosea was being called to be like God when he had to love a person who would have been difficult to love. We are difficult to love when we sin; a sin is always a transgression against the Lord.”

— Min Jin Lee

90. “She couldn’t say this to her son, however, because Noa was someone who had studied, labored, and tried to lift himself out of their street, and he thought all the men who hadn’t done so weren’t very bright, either. He would not understand. Her son could not feel compassion for those who did not try.”

— Min Jin Lee

91. “Sunja had made a mistake; however, she didn’t believe that her son came from a bad seed. The Japanese said that Koreans had too much anger and heat in their blood. Seeds, blood. How could you fight such hopeless ideas? Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed 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 in such cruel ideals.”

— Min Jin Lee

92. “It wasn’t uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort – the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn’t work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn’t be laundered by good results.”

— Min Jin Lee

93. “Her older sister used to say that men hated pity; rather, they wanted sympathy and admiration – not an easy combination.”

— Min Jin Lee

94. “Etsuko grew silent, utterly transfixed by the realization that how she saw herself was actually how her children saw her, too. They thought she was a monster.”

— Min Jin Lee

95. “In life, there was so much insult and injury, and she had no choice but to collect what was hers. But now she wished to take Solomon’s shame, too, and add it to her pile, though she was already overwhelmed.”

— Min Jin Lee

96. “The Lord forgives, but the world does not forgive.”

— Min Jin Lee

97. “There was some prettiness in her eyes, but her youth was spent.”

— Min Jin Lee

98. “The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned.”

— Min Jin Lee

99. “The penalties incurred for the mistakes you made had to be paid out in full to the members of your family. But she didn’t believe that she could ever discharge these sums.”

— Min Jin Lee

100. “Words never mattered’ he said, ‘seasons mattered. Notice how people behave when they’re desperate – that’s who they are,’ he warned.”

— Min Jin Lee