Quote

When I was at university, the policemen used to measure how short the women's mini-skirts were and how long guys' hair was. We were living under a government that considers people to be soldiers.

Kim Hyesoon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kim Hyesoon
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Women
Measure
Government
University
Long
Guys
Mini
People
Short
Considers
Hair
Policemen
Guy
Skirts
Living
Soldiers
Used
Soldier

More quotes by Kim Hyesoon

Image
In Korea, a woman must first obey her father, then her husband when she becomes an ajuma, and finally obey her son as a halmoni. Any woman who violates or lives outside of these roles is called a ch'angyŏ (prostitute).
Kim Hyesoon
Image
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.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
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.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
As a sick kid, I always looked out the window. The objects of my observation were the sun, the seasons, the wind, crazy people, and my grandfather's death. During my long period of observation, I felt that something like poems were filling up my body.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
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.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become the paper made of human meat, we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
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.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
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.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
There is a specific kind of day when I feel like writing poems. My senses become really sharp. This day is when I feel as if I am drowning into the abandonment of death.
Kim Hyesoon
Image
Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.
Kim Hyesoon