Living in 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 now.

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.

If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.

Suicide isn't something people do to hurt other people. It's something people do to release themselves from pain.

She's called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school.

I'm not going to put out a Christmas CD until it's coming out of me naturally.

We are totally committed to ending partition and to creating the conditions for unity and independence.

No, I don't tolerate pressure from anyone about anything.

Infinity? It attracts us like a floodlight in the night.

I have no ill feelings for nobody, I wish everybody the best, and I'm cool with everybody.

The development of the individual can be described as a succession of new births at consecutively higher levels.

Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.