Quotes from Min Jin Lee

It was as if she had decided some time ago that she would not care what she looked like beyond being clean, as if to pay penance for having once cared about such things, when in fact she had not.

A woman's life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then moer suffering. It's better to expect it, you know.

Korea won't always be divided.

she possessed a distant manner, preventing ease or intimacy with those around her. It was as if the young woman were turning down her lights to minimize any possibility of attraction or notice.

live without forgiveness was a kind of death with breathing and movement.

After Isak died, Yoseb had become a different man—sullen, brooding, and uninterested in anything but work.

Yoseb was almost unrecognizable from the boy she had loved from girlhood. He had become this cynical, broken man—something she could never have predicted. So it was only at the restaurant that Kyunghee behaved like herself. Here, she teased Kim like a younger brother and giggled with Sunja while they cooked. Now, even this place would be gone.

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.

but he wanted another chance to talk to him, to tell Noa that a man must learn to forgive—to know what is important, that to live without forgiveness was a kind of death with breathing and movement.

Her job was to rest before dying. All she had to do was nothing at all.

Times might have changed, to be sure, but butchery, which required touching dead animals, was still a shameful occupation—the chief reason given as to why the matchmaker had such difficulty arranging an omiai for him—and Tanaka couldn't help but feel a kind of kinship with foreigners

His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn't care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be, to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn't possible. It would never be possible with her.

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.

There was nothing else he could think of, and 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

Men have choices that women don't.

Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different. The other thing is that the elite Japanese want to be English and white. That's pathetic, delusional, and merits another discussion entirely.

Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different.

I want you to talk to me so I can go to sleep. I cannot sleep anymore, Solomon. I do not know why, but I cannot sleep anymore.

Japan will never change. It will never ever integrate gaijin...But it's not just you. Japan will never take people like my mother back into society again; it will never take back people like me. And we're Japanese

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

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

However, the players also came to escape the eerily quiet streets where few said hello, to keep away from the loveless homes where wives slept with children instead of husbands, and to avoid the overheated rush-hour train cars where it was okay to push but not okay to talk to strangers.

Ted Kim was sadistically illustrating that she'd only gone to Princeton, she was not of Princeton.

You must go to school. . .you represent our family, and you must be an excellent person. . .no matter what anyone says or does. . .be a diligent person with a humble heart. Have compassion for everyone. Even your enemies.