“I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety. That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place. The rite of an only daughter. But I could do no more than lie nearby, ready to be her advocate, listening to the slow and steady beeping of machinery, the soft sounds of her breathing in and out.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 86)
“In marked contrast to the other domains of parental authority, my mother was loose when it came to the rules regarding food. If I didn’t like something, she never forced me to eat it, and if I ate only half my portion, she never made me finish the plate. She believed food should be enjoyed and that it was more of a waste to expand your stomach than to keep eating when you were full. Her only rule was that you had to try everything once.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 22)
“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always ‘save ten percent of yourself.’ What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. ‘Even from Daddy, I save,’ she would add.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 18)
“The idea of ‘Fuck Yes…or N’ is far too simple and has caused me quite a lot of grief. Dropping out of college, I was maybe 51/49 on it. Leaving my corporate job to become a writer, maybe 60/40. Right now I’m about to do something big that I am both excited and terrified about. The point is: The certainty comes later. The truly life-changing decisions are never simple. If I had only ever done things I was absolutely certain about, I’d have missed out on experiences I love. Conversely, I regret a good chunk of my ‘Fuck yes’s’ because I was caught up in a fit of passion or bias. The whole point of risk is that you don’t know.“
Ryan Holiday
“Happiness is bigger than health. Health is the happiness of the body, happiness is the health of the soul.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 209)
“Within five years, I lost both my aunt and my mother to cancer. So, when I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did. H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone. It reminds me of who they were before, beautiful and full of life, wiggling Chang Gu honey-cracker rings on all ten of their fingers, showing me how to suck a Korean grape from its skin and spit out the seeds.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 11)
“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 6)
“My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary. I can tell you with a straight face what it was like watching my mom’s hair fall out in the bathtub, or about the five weeks I spent sleeping in hospitals, but catch me at H Mart when some kid runs up double-fisting plastic sleeves of ppeongtwigi and I’ll just lose it. Those little rice-cake Frisbees were my childhood, a happier time when Mom was there and we’d crunch away on the Styrofoam-like disks after school, splitting them like packing peanuts that dissolved like sugar on our tongues.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 5)
“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 4)
“The toxicity of self-discipline occurs when it is shame-driven, when you buy into a narrative that you are worthless or a failure for not being disciplined. I try to view both self-discipline and self-care as tools/skills. It’s important to be able to do hard things when necessary. But that doesn’t mean doing hard things is always necessary. Similarly, it’s important to be able to slow down and enjoy yourself when necessary. But that doesn’t mean slowing down and enjoying yourself is always necessary.”
Mark Manson
“If you are in pain––be it in life, work or love––reflect on a time you were hurting so deeply and so gutturally. If you retrace your steps and walk back to this broken place, you will surely find a bed of wildflowers growing there. Raid them. Cut them. Bunch them into a bouquet. Place them on your kitchen counter. On the days when your heart is so heavy, you wish you could pluck it out of your chest and wring it out in the kitchen sink––don’t. Instead, gaze upon the flowers on the counter and remind yourself that healing takes time.”
Cole Schafer
“If you already live a comfortable life, then choosing to make more money but live a worse daily life is a bad trade. And yet, we talk ourselves into it all the time. We take promotions that pay more, but swallow our free time. We already have a successful business, but we break ourselves trying to make it even more successful. Too much focus on wealth, not enough focus on lifestyle.”
James Clear
“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil—rich, fertile soil. She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 286)
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
Barbara Tuchman
“She would never be ashamed for her own nature. She would see the doctor. She would make an appointment and continue to do and take and try whatever they advised. She wouldn’t run from her pain any more. She wouldn’t poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection. She would see her own hurt, recognise it, and not imagine there was a life of unquestionable positivity and happiness she was being deprived from. She would accept the darkness of life in a way she never had, not as failure but as part of a totality, as something that threw other things into relief, into growth, into being. The ash in the soil.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 285)
“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 284)