Mother is a synonym for abandonment and death. Comparing this synonym to water, it is like poured-out water. I call it mother, the identity that I cannot identify.

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.

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.

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.

Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.

The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.

Music is a big influence in my work and sometimes drives the energy of where I want to go.

People like me, who care about printing, constitute the tiniest lunatic fringe in the nation.

When we discuss those we love with those who do not love them, the end of love is near.

I guess, I ended up finding music to pour my curiosity into. It was my creative outlet and therapy at the same time.

I want to share the ballet world with everyone.

We are living through the most exciting, challenging and most critical time in human history. Never before has so much been possible; and never before has so much been at stake.

You won't find one fish in a million that has enough sense to come in when it rains.

Whether it's destiny or fate or whatever, I don't think I could do a French Laundry anywhere else.