Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from If I Had Your Face:
“I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”
“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”
“I will build myself up so high in such a short time that when he leaves me, I will become a lightning storm, a nuclear apocalypse.I will not come out of this with nothing.”
“Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.”
“For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else. That's just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid-fire questions the minute they meet you. Which neighborhood do you live in? Where did you go to school? Where do you work? Do you know so-and-so? They pinpoint where you are on the national scale of status, then spit you out in a heartbeat.”
“...you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.”
“It's basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself.”
“In New York, you can talk to anyone about anything at any time and have a conversation so long you'll fall a little in love with that person, and then never see them again.”
“Why would you want to bring more children into this world so that they can suffer and be stressed their entire lives? And they’ll disappoint you and you will want to die. And you’ll be poor”
“In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.”
“I wanted to reach out and shake her by the shoulders. Stop running around like a fool, I wanted to say. You have so much and you can do anything you want.I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”
“But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.”
“I have no desire to stay past midnight every night for a company that treats me like an ant to be crushed by the heel of a shoe.”
“I want them to think I’m stupid,” she said to me once. “No expectation is nice. It gives you a lot of time to think.”
“In a way, I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, and I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach.”
“She doesn’t understand that I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own.”
“I know, because I was in love with a poor man once. He could not pay to spend time with me and I could not afford to spend time with him.”
“Us girls, we have been trained for years: “Say that you were the one who wanted to sleep with the customer. You just wanted some money. Got it?” So the girl gets jailed and fined for prostitution, and vilified in society as someone who does this for easy money. The girls who die in the process—the ones who are beaten to death or the ones who kill themselves—they don’t even make the news.”
“You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married—that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections.”
“Sometimes, when he is holding me and I feel like I am liquid in his arms, I wonder if anything else in my life will seem real after this. It is as if I traveled beyond the earth and reached out and touched a burning star, and it is both endurable and terrifying.”
“I am glad then that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time.”
“I AM GLAD, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time. In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life – if you live through it, that is.”
“The only gentlemen I ever see are in those dramas on TV. Those men are kind. They protect you and cry and stand up to their families for you”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep at night and wake up rich every day?”
“IN THE ORIGINAL STORY, the little mermaid endures unspeakable pain to gain her human legs. The Sea Witch warns her that her new feet will feel as if she is walking on whetted blades, but she will be able to dance like no human has ever danced before. And so she drinks the witch’s potion, which slices through her body like a sword. What I want to say, is that she danced divinely with her beautiful legs, even through the pain of a thousand knives. She was able to walk and run and stay close to her beloved prince, and even when things didn’t work out with him, that wasn’t the point. And in the end, after she said goodbye to her prince and flung herself into the sea, expecting to disintegrate into sea foam, she was carried away by the children of light and air.ISN’T THAT a beautiful story?”
“the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.”
“that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections. It was not just my grandmother; I have seen it time and time again. That is the one storyline”
“For my mother, who taught me how to hold on to a dream”
“One day, years after we stop living together, I will embark on a Kyuri series. I know that with absolute certainty. I cannot start now, when I am in the midst of my Ruby series, nor while I am still living with Kyuri. I need time and distance between us. But this is why I relish living with Kyuri now. I am spoon-feeding the muse that lives in a well deep inside of my brain--hearing Kyuri's stories, watching her drink to oblivion every weekend, obsessing over her face and her body and her clothes and her bags. I take photos of her and her things whenever I can. I will need them to remember her by. The other girls too, I have glimmers of them lurking in the outer regions of my mind; Sujin's terrifying transformation, and dear, silent Ara and her antediluvian upbringing. I will take years, though, before I can commit them to paper or form.As for Hanbin, I don't need Kyuri or Hanbin's mother to know that he will not be my salvation.”
“Men these days are actually much better than previous generations—the ones who used to bring mistresses into the house and make their wives feed and care for their bastard children.”
