Han Kang

The Vegetarian

Brittany

This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very lite that her body represented.

fæ 

nahis

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

laine

oh to be a tree bathing in the sunlight, no?

In-hue couldn’t hold herself back any long. “You!” she yelled. "I’m acting like this because I'm afraid youre going to die!" 

Yeong-hye turned her head and stared blankly at In-hye, as though the latter were not her sister but a complete stranger. After a while, the question came. 

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard- working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic. 

time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.

she'd been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. and before yeong-hye had broken those bars, she'd never even known they were there

or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. if so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface

karina

“I have dreams too, you know. Dreams… and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over… but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we?”

Mara D Alo Fonseca

The summer woods are dense and luxuriant beyond the windscreen of the ambulance. In the waning afternoon light, the rain on the leaves glitters intensely, kindling a green fire.

Lindy

She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She'd been unable to forgive herself for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. 

The Vegetarian quotes

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