Korean Culture Quotes

“I think I screamed. She certainly did. I started to walk away, she followed. We continued to scream at each other. We were in the middle of a busy square. People stopped to look at us. A lot of people. I wonder now what they thought. That Jin-Ae was my wife? My lover? Surely not an ambitious employee haranguing her boss!”
― Oliver Dowson

“It’s April 2006. It’s a Saturday. I’m walking through a market in Seoul, Korea, having a very public screaming match with a young Chinese-Korean woman whom I have recently promoted to Asia-Pacific Regional Manager. Despite the promotion, she is not happy. I think she wants my job. Right now, I’d happily give it to her if it would shut her up and calm me down. If I’d wanted a screaming match, I could have stayed at home; no, correct that, I’ve never had a domestic dispute as loud and unpleasant as this is turning out to be.”
― Oliver Dowson, There's No Business Like International Business: Business Travel – But Not As You Know It

“I believe in han. There's no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it's some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It's a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world. It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture.”
― David Chang, Eat a Peach

“She maneuvered a cart through the produce section, which featured boxes of fruits as gifts, amping up the volume and variety this time of year. She packed several Asian pears in a plastic tear-off bag, then moved on to the most perfect Fuyu persimmons, smooth, orange, and firm. She had always been embarrassed when her mother had given people such odd practical "Korean gifts" - the boxes of apples or even laundry detergent - when in reality, outside of America, these objects might have some rich symbolic relevance that perhaps Margot didn't understand.
If she thought of the labor and resources that went into each piece of fruit - the water, the light, the earth, the training and harvesting of each plant - a box of apples could be special, a sacred thing. Perhaps in this land of plenty, of myth and wide-open spaces, trucks and factories, mass production, we lost track of that: the miracle of an object as simple as a pear, nutritious and sweet, created by something as beautiful as a tree.”
― Nancy Jooyoun Kim, The Last Story of Mina Lee

“우주의 유일한 진리는 사랑입니다.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amor Apocalypse: Canım Sana İhtiyacım

“의식은 우주다.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“당신은 나의 과학,
당신은 나의 예술,
당신은 내 마음의 아침입니다.
당신은 나의 집,
당신은 나의 천국,
당신은 내 삶의 진실입니다.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission