Quotes from Min Jin Lee

Yoseb read three or four papers to glean some truth from the gaps and overlaps.

The fools here have pumpkins for heads, and seeds are not brains.

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 est. At those moments, it was good to be alone to hold on to him.

Competence can be a curse

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.

That evening, when Noa did not call her, she realized that she had not given him her home number in Yokohama. In the morning, Hansu phoned her. Noa had shot himself a few minutes after she'd left his office.

reading. His abundant meals were sent to his room on a

It's my job to know what others don't. How did you know to make kimchi and sell it on a street corner to earn money? You knew because you wanted to live. I want to live, too, and if I want to live, I have to know things others don't. Now, I'm telling you something valuable.

Seeds, blood. How could you fight such hopeless ideas?

At work, nearly everyone was Korean, so nothing stupid was said about his background. At school, Mozasu hadn't thought that the taunts has bothered him much, but when the mean remarks had utterly disappeared from his daily life he realized how peaceful he could feel.

he was the clean wrapper for a filthy deed.

With a first name from a Western religion, an obvious Korean surname, and his ghetto address, everyone knew what he was—there was no point in denying it.

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

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. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person.

That was the whole point of money, wasn't it, to be able to get your kid whatever he needed?

will one day have a fine figure, but for now,

He could never replace her. And he felt he had done her a great injustice by not having told her this.

he wanted to spare her the cruelty of what he had learned, because she would not believe that she was no different than her parents, that seeing him as only Korean - good or bad - was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.

Mozasu knew he was becoming one of the bad Koreans. Police officers often arrested Koreans for stealing or home brewing. Every week, someone on his street got in trouble with the police.

Man, life's going to keep pushing you around, but you have to keep playing.

was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful—for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor.

expected Noa to do the same thing as Mozasu.

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.

Yoseb was not wrong, and she could not take this back.