No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice.
A monument will never change how she feels. It’s unfair that victims should have to forgive those who raped, tortured, and killed, or burned villages to the ground. On an Island of World Peace, shouldn’t those who inflicted terrible harm on others be forced to confess and atone, and not make widows and mothers pay for stone monuments?
When you do things in a soft way, you make the other people believe they’ve thought up something to do for you, when actually you’re directing them.” Later, Ruth.
People are shaped by the earth and water around them.
Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.
Deep love-true-heart love-must grow. Back then I didn’t yet understand the burning kind of love, so instead I thought about the rice paddies I used to see on my daily walks down to the river with my brother when I still had all my milk teeth. Maybe I could make our love grow like a farmer made his crop to grow-through hard work, unwavering will, and the blessings of nature. How funny that I can remember that even now! Waaa! I knew so little about life, but I knew enough to think like a farmer.
Confucius didn’t care much for women: When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.
Men are so sure of themselves, and they have such courage and conviction. They believe-truly believe- that they can make things happen just by speaking the words, and in many cases they can.
It’s a Sun and Moon truth that if a husband sees his wife give birth, he might die from it.
Although I can’t possibly have a single memory of this place. Then, from deep within me, a profound sense of love radiating out to everything around me complemented by reciprocal waves of love coming at me, enveloping me. All.
Maybe stories and memories are destined to be incomplete...
Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.
For a tree that has many branches, even a small breeze will shake some loose.
What’s your first impression of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? Your first ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise?
The three-step farming system that gives our pigs food from our behinds, fertilizer for our dry fields from the pigs’ behinds, and a pig that can eventually be eaten.
A woman isn’t just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift perspectives as do joy and triumphs.
To believe in dreams is to spend half your life asleep.
The fallen leaves return to the root.
You may not know this, but the cold-water stress that the haenyeo endure is greater than for any other human group in the world.
This is how things were: heavyhearted, but done in the traditional manner. THE.