Kyung-Sook Shin

Kyŏng-suk Sin

In 1980s South Korea, 20-something Jung Yoon is forced to re-live the most intense period of her life, including the death of her beloved mother, first love and friendship, when she receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation. Original.

A Novel

I'll be Right There

giuli

It was then that I finally realized I was not made up only of myself. Everything I saw and everything I felt was also part Dahn. And part Miru. And partly their unfinished time that I was living.

My Christophers, thankyou for being a part of my life. Do not grieve for me. All things must come to an end youth, pain, passion, emptiness, war, violence. Do the flowers not bloom and fade? Just as I came into being, so must I pass out of existence. Look up to the sky. That's where the stars are. They are always shining there, whether we are gazing up at them, and whether we forget, and long after we die. May each one of you become one of those shining stars.

Professor Yoon had once said that knowing you are alive means knowing you will soon change into a different form, and that that is the source of our hope. 

I want to stop drifting from one phenomenon to another. Right now, my only strength is this feeling of solidarity. When I take to the streets, the fog in my head and even this bottomless despair seems to lift. Let's remember this forever

Earthbound beings unfortunately cannot break free of gravity. Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture. Insofar as everything is always changing, so our sense of hope shall never die out. Therefore, I leave you all with one final thouht: Live. Until you are down to your final breath, love and fight and rage and grieve and live.

I love to recite this clichéd line of poetry: "Should this life sometime deceive you, Don't be sad or mad at it!" All the while wondering if perhaps it is not life deceiving me, but me deceiving life.

But realizing the belief that I am me-the idea that I am worth somethingis just dust, nothing more than wind with no substance, fills me with the bitterest of agonies that gnaws at my insides. 

I want us all, starting with me, to be confident and stand on our own two feet. I want relationships that are honest and free of secrets and abuse.

I'm trying to think about what I can do. But instead all that comes to mind are the things I can't do. How do we judge truth and goodness? Where are justice and righteousness hiding? A society that is violent or corrupt prohibits mutual communication. A society that fears communication is unable to solve any problem. It looks for someone to shift the responsibility to and turns even more violent.

We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences. 

I wish the only things that ever happened to us were ones where you could ask how and why. 

I think that was the moment I realized that pouring your heart out to someone might not bring you closer but in fact make you poorer instead. I even thought maybe growing close to someone was better achieved by empathizing in silence. 

Each time he breathed, my chest and stomach clenched. That tightness also came with the piquant joy of seeing the ocean for the first time, of rising at the crack of dawn in winter and discovering the courtyard white with snow, of scraping a fingernail in disbelief over a grapevine where green tendrils flush with spring curl out of a dried-up and lifeless plant, of looking down at the pink fingernails of a young child. 

Why couldn't liking someone simply be joyful? Why must it also contain sorrow and despair? 

[…] cats are more attached to places than to people. And that was why cats are so often found in abandoned houses. 

I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we've been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else. 

Literature and art are not simply what will carry you; they are also what you must lay down your life for, what you must labor over and shoulder for the rest of your life.

When I try to type, my thoughts keep stopping and looking back as my hands try to catch up.

Nevertheless, I hope that when I die, I will be writing or reading a book at my desk late one snowy night and I will simply put my head down and close my eyes forever. 

Growing old does not make us any better at loving one another or understanding the meaning of life or death. 

It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast.

If youth were something we could do over, I would not be standing here today, answering my phone and listening to his voice for the first time in eight years.

em 摇摇

nicole

kim♡

finished this in such a short time. it was a great book about youth, going through loss, grief, despair, and everything in between. i loved the friendships formed all throughout the story, the beauty and ugliness of standing up in what you believe in.

and i learned here two phrases to say during tough times—“let’s remember this day, forever” and “i’ll be right there”.

sarah

Eri Asahi

I can almost see how this book would look if it were turned into big screen. This book is about devastation over the death of closest ones during the time of political turmoil in South Korea. Slow burner, but worth every second of it.

stephanie

(3.75 stars)
Very melancholic & often quite beautiful. This seemed more like a Winter read, than a Summer read, but maybe that's just me. Despite being very beautifully written at times, this didn't really hit the spot for me. Probably because I couldn't seem to feel deeply for the characters at all, despite all their suffering 😬 is it just me? or is it the book? I still liked it tho.
Some content warnings: Death (heavy emphasis on this!!), suicide

This is a book I'll read again when I'm going through a rough patch centered around a loss of my sense of self and how it relates to those I love. There's lots of loss and love in this book. It's written beautifully and simply in a way that makes understanding clear (for someone like me who can't see things in their head). Deep enjoy. A new possible favorite. 

madina

couldnt stop crying, folks!!!! a testament to mary oliver's and nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world.  it was incredible.

I'll be Right There A Novel

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