• The White Book by Han Kang (as translated by Deborah Smith)

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• "At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived, and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable. The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight."
• "he who had shipwrecked himself in an alley, who had pushed himself up on cold-numbed hands, thinking of what his life has been, of the loneliness that waits for him at home, thinking what is this, what the hell is this damned dirty white falling snow."
• "Sparse flakes fly in all directions. In the black air where the street lights do not touch. Whirled above the black branches of wordless trees. Brushing against the bowed heads trudging through the night."
• "On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living. Proof of our bodies' warmth. Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives' miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air."
• "In this city of severe winters, a December night unspools itself around her. The darkness outside the window has no moon to soften it."
• "On such a night, without the slightest reason, the sea surges up."
• "And she frequently forgot, that her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand. That it had shattered and is shattering still, slipping stubbornly through fingers."
• "Do I go down into that ocean floor, step by faltering step, or stand my ground here in this island of light?"
• "Learning to love again is a long and complicated process. Because at some point you will inevitably cast me aside. When I am at my weakest, when I am most in need of help, you will turn your back on me, cold and irrevocable. And that is something perfectly clear to me. And I cannot now return to the time before that knowledge."
• "Please, a little longer like this. To give it time to wash me clean."
• "I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn't come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror."
• "Don't die. For God's sake don't die. I open my lips and mutter the words you heard on opening your black eyes, you who were ignorant of language. I press down with all my strength onto the white paper. I believe that no better words of parting can be found. Don't die. Live."
• "With your eyes, I will see the chill of the half-moon risen in the day. At some point those eyes will see a glacier. They will look up at that enormous mass of ice and see something sacred, unsullied by life. They will see inside the silence of the white birch forest. Inside the stillness of the window where the winter sun seeps in. Inside those shining grains of dust swaying along the shafts of light which slant onto the ceiling."