Quotes from Min Jin Lee

The big secret that he kept from his mother, aunt, and even his beloved uncle was that Noa did not believe in God anymore. God had allowed his gentle, kindhearted father to go to jail even though he had done nothing wrong. For two years, God had not answered Noa's prayers, though his father had promised him that God listens very carefully to the prayers of children.

It was his way to ask many questions when he wanted to know someone's mind. Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well. What was most disappointing to him was when a person turned out to be no different than the next.

Her mother had shrunk.

I will never be able to wash this dirt from my name. You can't be very bright," he said. "How can you make something clean from something dirty? And now, you have made me dirty," Noa said quietly,

fight and end up as a martyr. Protesting was for young men without families.

This was her first time in such a place, and she decided she never wanted to stay anywhere else. Yet in her head, Casey envisioned a meter, like a taxi meter—clicking, clicking, clicking speedily ahead.

In America, everything seemed fixable, and in Japan, difficult problems were to be endured. Shoganai, shoganai. How many times had he lheard these words? It cannot be helped. His mother had apparently hated that expression, and suddenly he understood her rage against this cultural resignation that violated her beliefs and wishes. Pachinko, p456

Why had he come? When would he go? It was his way to appear then disappear, and as she boiled water for their tea, she thought, I could turn around and he could be gone.

At the crowded bar, men were drinking and making jokes, but there hadn't been a soul in that squalid room—smelling of burnt dried squid and alcohol—who wasn't worried about money and facing the terror of how he was supposed to take care of his family in this strange and difficult land.

I know you didn't want us. My brothers told me, and I told them they were wrong even though I knew they weren't. I clung to you because I wasn't going to let you just leave what you started. How can you tell me how hard it is to have children? You haven't even tried to be a mother. What right do you have? What makes you a mother?

For every patriot fighting for a free Korea, or for any unlucky Korean bastard fighting on behalf of Japan, there were ten thousand compatriots on the ground and elsewhere who were just trying to eat. In the end, your belly was your emperor.

Sunja believed this. She had loved Hansu, and then she had loved Isak. However, what she felt for her boys, Noa and Mozasu, was more than the love she'd felt for the men; this love for her children felt like life and death. After Noa had gone, she felt half-dead. She could not imagine any mother feeling differently.

There was consolation: The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned.

she was sixteen years old, not a scared child.

was his way to ask many questions when he wanted to know someone's mind. Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well.

History has failed almost everybody who is ordinary.

It had been eleven years since he'd died; the pain didn't go away, but its sharp edge had dulled and softened like sea glass.

Hansu smiled. "You are almost seventeen. I'm thirty-four. I am exactly twice your age. I am going to be your elder brother and your friend. Hansu-oppa. Would you like that?

Hansu had not been in a forest since he was a boy—that time before he became a tough teenager who could hustle and steal with the wisest street kids of Osaka.

In their long marriage, the wife gave birth to three sons, but only Hoonie, the eldest and the weakest one, survived. Hoonie was born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot; he was however, endowed with hefty shoulders, a squat build, and a gold complexion.

so often that she'd feared for

Too pretty. That's her problem.

There was always talk of Koreans going back home, but in a way, all of them had lost the home in their minds for good.

Hansu did not believe that man was designed to have sex with only one woman; marriage was unnatural to him, but he would never abandon a woman who had borne him children.