Quotes from Eugenia Kim

It was pointless to worry about problems I didn't yet have.

It was incredible, this human capacity for learning, for hope, for love, that persisted like to box of light in my cell, the waters that flowed in my dreams. It was beyond my understanding. Tears came as I surrendered to this wonderment of being.

She kept her voice gentle and her eyes down, for without such softening traits, Haejung's mother had often said, a woman's presence would be like a thorn and not a flower.

I sipped, thanking the particles of tea leaves for absorbing the sun's heat on dewy terraced mountains, growing fat and lustrous, then drying in the same heat, preserving God's grace in a fragile, fragrant medium for me to drink at this table.

My mother was not one to say to her children "I love you". It was an assumed truth, given freely at the gate of the womb.

Without having to confine my dreams to the destiny outlined in one's name and the expectations bestowed during one's naming, I was left free to embrace the natural turns of my character and to determine my own future, drawing from the deepest well on unnamed possibilities.

You must always think first of your family, your father, and put your own thoughts and desires last.

We were Methodists now and didn't worship our ancestors as gods. But the commandments that decreed the one true God also said to honor thy father and mother. So it was right, Mother said, to follow the old ways and esteem our predecessors who had paved the paths upon which we walked.