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

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.

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.

Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.

The more my brain was fed, the hungrier it became.

The President spends most of his time kissing people on the cheek in order to get them to do what they ought to do without getting kissed.

The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful.

The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that's not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.

The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

It is not how tall you are, it is how GOOD you are.

I don't like it when I hear it said: 'but these youth say stupid things!'

I am nothing, neither a chief nor a soldier.