Michelle Zauner Quotes

Michelle Chongmi Zauner

Michelle Chongmi Zauner is a Korean-American singer and guitarist, best known as the lead vocalist of the alternative pop band Japanese Breakfast. Her 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, passed one continuous year on the New York Times bestseller list in July 2022. (Michelle Zauner Quotes)

“Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“I’ve just never met someone like you,” as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. ”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. Why is she here slurping up spicy jjamppong noodles and my mom isn’t? Other people must feel this way. Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“In many ways, food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she seemed—constantly pushing me to be what she felt was the best version of myself—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.” (Michelle Zauner Quotes)
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“Save your tears for when your mother dies.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.”

“To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir