Quotation Study - Greek Lessons, Han Kang

On speech marking us just as much as a written word on paper...

This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!

These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.

There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.

This week: Greek Lessons by Han Kang

I love words. Analysing singular words in sentences gives me a lot of joy, hence these quotation studies. That fascination has shaped so much of how I see the world. I remember taking A-level English Literature and Language, nearly a decade ago now, and finding myself enchanted not just by stories, but by the machinery of language itself: how a word’s origin can quietly trace a history, how syntax can alter meaning with the smallest shift.

That obsession stayed with me, long after I left those classrooms. And somehow, quite unexpectedly, it found a home in my work today. I spend my days in compliance, where my job is to look at language at its most precise: to question whether a single word is compliant, whether a sentence might invite ambiguity. It’s the same granular attention, but repurposed — no longer for literature, but for clarity, for control.

There’s something uncanny about Latin and Greek, not because they are holy, but because they have survived. Worn, fragmented, reshaped by time, but still here. That’s what I found so striking in this passage:

‘Whatever their motivation, those who study Greek share certain tendencies. They walk and talk slowly, for the most part, and don’t show much emotion. Perhaps because this language is a long-dead one and doesn’t allow for oral communication. Silence, shy hesitation and reactions of muted laughter slowly heat the air inside the classroom, and slowly cool it.’

There’s such intimacy here. The image of a classroom warmed by tentative speech, cooled again by the return to silence. The language itself enforces slowness, carefulness. It cannot be rushed because it no longer lives in the mouth. Greek is not a language of spontaneity now; it is a language of translation, of pause, of distance.

‘A language that does not wait to be combined with any other prior to use, a supremely self-sufficient language.’

I keep turning over that idea. Greek, a language that does not need to adapt, that resists combination, that carries its completeness within itself. And perhaps that’s what makes it so haunting: it exists not for conversation, but for memory. It asks nothing of the present.

‘Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens.’

Language as a fabric, thinned by use, shaped by the hands and voices that have touched it. Ancient languages like Greek and Latin feel remote to us now, but they are not untouched. They have been handled, interpreted, translated again and again. There’s something poignant in that: survival through erosion. These languages endure, but they are no longer what they were.

‘She gets the sense sometimes that her inhales and exhales resemble speech.’

This line stopped me. The idea that breath itself can mimic language — that there is meaning in the rhythm of our bodies even before we speak. It reminds me that language is not only in words. There is speech in breath, in the pause, in the silent exchange.

‘Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack.’

Kang’s description makes me reconsider what it means to speak. I’ve always thought of language as intellectual, as symbolic. It is bodily, effortful, intimate. Speech is not just about what is said, but about the act of saying: the movement of air, the work of the mouth, the space language travels to reach another person. Even our bodies bear the wear of communication. Speech marks us just as much as a written word on paper...

This way of thinking about language ,as something both fragile and resilient, both abstract and deeply physical, feels like an invitation to notice more. To attend not just to what we say, but to what it costs to say it. To recognise that even silent languages, like Greek, continue to speak in their own way: through memory, through translation, through the shapes they leave behind.

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