whereabouts in the body is that bird when the person is still alive? In that furrowed brow, above the halolike crown of that head, in some chamber of the heart?

I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to finish the previous class early; in fact it went on longer than usual. Please have a seat. Can I get you something to drink? Yes, I knew the previous owner was one of Dong-ho’s teachers. I hadn’t realized you would know our story. To be honest, I was in two minds about the whole thing. At first I was worried that

I’m fighting, alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

thicket, we slipped past each other’s shadows,

The censors had scored through four lines in the paragraph following that one. Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another? Eun-sook could remember the precise thickness of the line that had been drawn through these sentences. She could recall

Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.

Dong-ho, I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaught

She clutched the sleeve of your uniform. “Don’t you know how shocked I was when people said they’d seen you here? Good grief, all these corpses; aren’t you scared?” “The soldiers are the scary ones,” you said with a half-smile. “What’s frightening about the dead?”