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Samuel Park

Samuel Park was an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He graduated from Stanford University and the University of Southern California, where he earned his doctorate. He is the author of the novella Shakespeare's Sonnets and the writer-director of a short film of the same name, which was an official selection of numerous domestic and international film festivals. He is also the author of the novels This Burns My Heart and The Caregiver. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times. Born in Brazil and raised in Los Angeles, he split his time between Chicago and Los Angeles. In April 2017, Park died of stomach cancer at age 41 shortly after finishing The Caregiver.


“Why are we asked to make the most important decisions of our lives when we are so young, and so prone to mistakes?”
Samuel Park
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“We're only given one life, and it's the one we live, she had thought; how painful now, to realize that wasn't true, that you would have different lives, depending on how brave you were, and how ready.”
Samuel Park
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“Chamara. What is the word that comes closest to it? Soo-Ja wondered. To stand it, to bear it, to grit your teeth and not cry out? To hold on, to wait until the worst is over? There is no other word for it, no way to translate it. It is not a word. It is a way to console yourself. He is not just telling her to stand the pain, but giving her comfort, the power to do so. Chamara is an incantation, and if she listens to its sound, she believes that she can do it, that she will push through this sadness. And if she is strong about it, she'll be rewarded in the end. It is a way of saying, I know, I feel it, too. This burns my heart, too.”
Samuel Park
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“Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.”
Samuel Park
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“It occurred to Soo-Ja that if she gave him permission, he'd kiss her right then and there. But she realized that all along, what she really wasn't to have him in the present - how could she, married woman that she was, married man that he was — but to rewrite the past, have him go back in time and create a version that allowed them to kiss. To be able to kiss him did not seem to take much — a step forward, the angling of her face. But, in fact, it required rearranging the molecules of every interaction they had ever had, from the very first day they met.”
Samuel Park
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“The thing about capturing a prize fish is that everyone admires the fish, and soon forgets about the fisherman. You love the thing that makes you special, then hate it because it's the thing that makes you special.”
Samuel Park
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