Human Acts
Han Kang
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
“After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.”
“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.”
“Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.”
“I'm fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.”
“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.”
“I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.”
“This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.”
“After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.”
“The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”
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Book Keywords:
human, humanity, time, thought-provoking, human-race, pain, healing, human-acts, wounds, memory, trauma
