“It is the experience of those who have had to do with the various peoples of the Far East that it is easier to understand the Korean and get close to him than it is to understand either the Japanese or the Chinese.”

“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.”

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”

“I think it's easier to know why people do bad things than to understand the true meaning of kind acts.”

“It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.”

“My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue”