Bora Chung > Quotes

“Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“… If I could make a wish I want to be just a little happier
If I become too happy I will miss sadness”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts. Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive. That moment is short, but long after it has passed, good times as well as bad slip like sand through their fingers as they meaninglessly repeat and confirm their survival.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Life is a series of problems. Especially when one is married and has a family. Because even when you manage to avoid the problems of the outside world and return home safely, your family is there waiting with a whole different set of problems of their own.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“If I could make one wish
I want to be just a little happier
If I'm too happy
I will miss the sadness”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“But there I remained, standing in the bathroom, waiting for someone to miraculously find me, to release me from my ties to this life.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Every person has only one childhood, and instead of being full of hopes or dreams, his had been crushed by the fight for survival. He never once imagined in all his years spent in the cave that a different childhood from the one that had been accorded to him might have been possible.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Those who are unaware of their lives slipping away while they are ensnared in the past, are in the end, whether alive or dead, ghosts of the past”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“That was the first time he sobbed in earnest. Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Had some giant trapped inside the cave of the night sky struck their chains against some unimaginably large wall to create the stars? Had they done it as a cry for help? Or to endure, somehow, the emptiness and the darkness?”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“I didn’t believe in any bright future for me. I didn’t know if I would even be able to make a living. Therefore, “a moment ago” was always the best moment, and the present was always better than the future.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Capitalism is nothing before the forces of love and passion!”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“One can break the curse, but it is impossible to cure their blindness from greed. They were always ready to wage another war”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“The wife swiftly gathered her daughter in her arms. She shook off her son, who was still clinging to his sister's leg trying to drink her blood, and made a dash for the door. She was blocked by her husband. He needed his daughter's body if he were to get more blood from his son's. He couldn't let her leave with the source of his gold.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts. Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive. That moment is short, but long after it has passed, good times as well as bad slip like sand through their fingers as they meaninglessly repeat and confirm their survival. Those who are unaware of their lives slipping away while they are ensnared in the past—him, his grandfather, his mother, me—are in the end, whether alive or dead, ghosts of the past.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“In order to survive, children come to their own understanding of their place in their world. It looks as if children are limited in what they are conscious of, but they comprehend very quickly the intention of adults and the trust given to them, better and more precisely than adults themselves do.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“If I could make one wish
I want to be just a little happier
It I'm too happy
I will miss the sadness”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Never make a cursed fetish for personal reasons. Never use a handmade object in a personal curse. There are reasons for the unwritten rules.
There's a Japanese saying that goes, "Cursing other leads to two graves." Anyone who curses another person is sure to end up in a grave themselves.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Her husband had pursued an “alternative lifestyle” that was “free of the fetters of capitalism.” The woman herself, when she was in college, had considered the conformist pressures of getting good grades, building a resume, and landing a job in some big corporation to be tedious and distasteful and had thought the life her husband wanted dovetailed with hers. They got married as soon as she graduated, and she got a job right after. She learned quickly that an “alternative lifestyle” meant nothing without a detailed, concrete plan, and living “free of the fetters of capitalism” meant working for places that didn’t pay their workers on time. As she worried about realizing this alternative lifestyle in the real world, she crumbled away under the pressures of working at a company in the non-profit sector that was run not by the normal labor of workers, but through their unrequited sacrifices. Meanwhile, her husband, who was her upperclassman in college but graduated later than she did, fiddled around in search of his ideal “alternative lifestyle” without ever settling down on any particular profession—the result being the twenty-million-won loan he had taken out and used up without her knowledge.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“The absurdity of the conclusion made him feel helpless. The strangers who stole his childhood with their sorcerer and beliefs, the despondent life he had lived on the brink of death, it had all been meaningless in the end. Mourning his years of suffering and despair, he stood there in the ruins of the village and wept.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Humans are born, they grow, they are active, they age, and then die. That is human.”
― Bora Chung, Your Utopia

“I could also understand how, in a situation where there was a single person who could kill you but also save you, all your survival instincts would be used toward satisfying that one person.
Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.
Parents who destroy their children's lives, who suck the life out of their children's futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their own children- such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words, "Be grateful I raised you" is the implied clause "instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“...it doesn’t mean the world will change. There will still be those who will continue to be beaten in silence, and those who will continue to die in silence.
But maybe there will also be those who will survive. And I want to be able to have as little shame as possible when I stand before those who do.”
― Bora Chung, Your Utopia

“Even when both sides agree to compromise, there is always a side that compromises more than the other.”
― Bora Chung, Your Utopia

“If we could understand that god so well, they wouldn't be a god in the first place. But I believe there is something that's grander than what we can perceive with our five senses or comprehend with our human minds.”
― Bora Chung, Your Utopia

“Hope exists if you think it to existence. If you don't have any, you can just make it up.”
― Bora Chung, Your Utopia

“There’s a Japanese saying that goes, “Cursing others leads to two graves.” Anyone who curses another person is sure to end up in a grave themselves”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Some machines are happier than humans.”
― Bora Chung, Your Utopia