Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

Before yesterday evening, twenty-six of the eighty-three coffins hadn’t yet been brought out for a group memorial service;

How could I tell whether your father’s loosening grip on life was something I ought to pity, or to envy?

Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist?

Or no, is it like a kind of glass?

Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

Eun-sook hadn’t

Certain shadows seemed marked by the weight of long drawn-out agonies, whose depths I was unable to fathom.

Had they been there alongside me, jostling my elbow, part of that vast mass of humanity whose voices ebbed and surged as one, yelling and singing and cheering at the buses and taxis that inched their way through the throng, headlights on, making a show of solidarity?

I wasn’t Park Jeong-dae, whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister.

no longer felt fifteen. Thirty-five, forty-five; these numbers came, in turn, to feel somehow insufficient.