I made reference to the book I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee in my previous article (Here). Today’s article is simply a list of ten quotes/passages from the book that I found to be thought-provoking and/or meaningful. I hope you find some value in them!

• “You go to university on the merit of your high school grades but depending on what you become interested in after that, the depth and breadth of your thoughts vary tremendously. Your high school grades do not determine the rest of your life” (page 46).

• “What matter isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires” (page 48).

• “You mustn’t let your hobby become stressful” (page 49).

• “Of course, how you feel about yourself is much more important than what your friends think of you” (page 79).

• “Things will get better with time. Or no, everything is dynamic, which means life will have jump-for-joy moments as well as bad ones, going back and forth like the tide. If I’m sad today I’ll be happy tomorrow, and if I’m happy today I’ll be sad tomorrow – that’s fine. As long as I keep loving myself. I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forward, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness” (page 83-84).

• “Fear increases when it’s something that you keep to yourself. Instead of suffering alone, it can often be good to share it with someone else, like you’re doing now” (page 118).

• “Life is all about getting better and getting worse and getting better again, so getting worse is a natural part of life and I just have to learn to deal with it” (page 142).

• “I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time. Some day, I will” (page 154).

•  “But for a patient to brave societal prejudices and reveal in such vivid detail all the experiences that led her to seek treatment and the difficult process of treatment itself – this is perhaps not something that is as easily googleable as the name of an antidepressant” (page 156).
• “Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too” (page 156).

Hopefully you took something valuable from these quotes and passages. The book itself is incredibly powerful and is one I would highly recommend looking into further!