Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.

The rhythm of my body is the same as my mother tongue. It is in this rhythm where I find sanctity, that I can return to my mother who is everywhere in the universe.

Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.

Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.

I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.

Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.

Living in South Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in.

If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

It does not take the striking pose of a high-fashion model or the strict stance of someone in uniform to earn respect and admiration.

But one doesn't wait for a revolution. One becomes it.

Your life only gets better when you get better.

Every tomorrow has two handles we can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith If you can quit, quit. If you can't quit, stop complaining - this is what you chose.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.

There's no such thing as "an auteurist filmmaker." Every film directors is an auteur. We only make films that we do because we cannot put on clothes that don't fit us.

Perfume is a form of writing, an ink, a choice made in the first person, the dot on the i, a weapon, a courteous gesture, part of the instant, a consequence.

It’s cool to be kind. It’s cool to be weird. It’s cool to be honest and to be secure with yourself.

Sometimes you take something because it's an offer and it's big and it's good money and you have to absolutely respect that process, because it's not easier.

The Smiths was an incredibly personal thing to me. It was like launching your own diary to music.