Author's Note | Why don't you support it?

Chapter 1 │ A Summer-like Summer, a Winter-like Winter

Rejoice and be sad, cry and laugh
Running is always fun
A truly cool ear, without any persistence
I've just passed the peak of my youth.
Just by glancing at the sky
If only I could speak, if only I could listen
This moment, all I know about this summer
I tried to speak but stopped, I tried to speak but stopped
To lower the price of solitude supplied to the city.
Snow, seafood, canals, beer, friends
2009 Sky List

Chapter 2: Draft Beer, a Drunken Mind, and the Marathon Man of Good Times

Everyone is already half a runner.
My complex is that people are too nice
We are all heroes and peerless people
Let's spend this summer having fun, you ghost.
How to help this universe
The center of the universe, so to speak, which operates the cosmic mind as it pleases
A magic spell for unprepared travelers
Rollerblading Grandpa, Espresso Grandma
Not a barbarian, but a marathon man
I've been running all summer, so I can drink as much beer as I want.
I am writing this in the hope that you will read it again.

Chapter 3: The Art of Making Good Use of Life

Rosa is now under the yellow magpie tree
Is this the book you want to read right now?
A memory for one, a reminiscence for two
Table tennis match at 4pm on weekdays
The longed-for North
My most beautiful heaven
What we do when we want to say we're lonely
It's a chance, life, it's okay to grow your hair out

Chapter 4│But Life Is a High Art

Anyway, the universe will help me too.
A's plan, B's life
This is not a question of faith, it is a question of fact.
The first breath of summer
Hellish training for a squishy rubber mind
Sentences for the day the lake froze over
If we could be together without talking
The Boy in Question, and 20 Years Later
Can I become someone other than myself?

Chapter 5│More air, more wind

Run for a long time or sleep deeply
Slow down to the green zone
Addicted to not blaming yourself
Against gravity, lift me a little upwards
Like a drop of water, like glass
Understanding this world through the body
Running of fickleness and change of heart
If you think about it physically, it's a poet or a runner
When you accept pain and suffering at the borderline
Again, in front of the wall
As long as the heart beats, time is meaningless
Hearts that don't beat, all guilty

Kim Yeon-su speaks about a life where "you don't have to try so hard to win."

Novelist Kim Yeon-su has earned the trust of the literary world and the public with just her name, having published seven full-length novels and four short story collections to date.
Readers waiting for his new work may wonder:
"Where do the diverse worlds he creates come from? What kind of life did he lead? Where does he draw inspiration? What on earth does the novelist Kim Yeon-su think as he reflects on his life?"

He has now become a mid-career novelist and has returned to us with a new and more mature collection of prose, different from the sentences he has written so far.
The topic is 'the word 'not supporting'.


My father spent his boyhood and youth during the war.
Even after returning home after liberation, my father had many difficult times.
Not to mention the Korean War, he lived in a world where he had to win to survive for a long time afterward.
(Omitted) On days when we lost a game, all the members of the company received a warning.
This is the so-called 'spirit of solidarity'.
(Omitted) If you don't beat someone else, you end up a loser, and this loser is not welcomed by anyone.
That's what sports meant to me.
But I just felt strange.
Does not winning really mean defeat? Does not losing necessarily mean winning?
― From the author's words

The story of "The Words That Don't Give Up" begins with a childhood memory of a father muttering "I lost, I lost" while watching a soccer game, and an experience in the military that gave me a taste of the "solidarity of suffering."

So this book is also a collection of stories about love, clouds, wind, raindrops on trees, novels written and books read, art and people that Kim Yeon-su experienced from when she was a child until she became middle-aged.
Ultimately, it contains stories about finding joy and hope in life.
You will read sentences with deeper and broader literary thought, sentences that are new and not found in his novels.


About the despair we inevitably accept in order to move toward hope.

Kim Yeon-su is a famous running enthusiast who translated the book “Running and Being” out of her love for running.
Running, which began at the age of 26 to alleviate the sadness of being unemployed, has gradually become a large part of Kim Yeon-su's life, influencing her world as well.


It was the first time I participated in a competition and crossed the finish line.
As I entered the stadium with my head bowed, running and stopping with a truly embarrassing record, I saw families lined up on both sides of the road, eagerly waiting for us to enter.
The moment I realized that so many people were looking at me, something truly amazing happened.
Those people whose faces I didn't even know were applauding me and encouraging me that I only had to go a little further.
As soon as I heard that cheer, I felt a warm glow spread across my back and a bright color came to my face.
Anyone who saw this might have thought he was about to cross the finish line with a world record.
― From the author's words

Kim Yeon-su thinks about the various meanings of the word 'not supporting' and discovers specific aspects of it.
And then I realized something.
The point is that “in order to move towards hope, one must inevitably accept despair.”
As the expression “marathon is a metaphor for life” suggests, he does not avoid or run away from the walls of life.
Just hold on and wait for that moment to pass.

Also, as a novelist and a human being, I live my life by enjoying what I like at every moment, enduring and overcoming the inevitable as much as I can, and doing what I want to do now.
Kim Yeon-su writes that thanks to this attitude toward life, life has become more precious and has become connected to hope.


Through this book, he recommends a life of “repeatedly enduring and overcoming as much pain as one can accept,” and he never forgets the reassuring words that “a life that draws out the tolerance and indifference that only humans can possess and moves forward once more is art” in the face of life’s hardships.
So, I recommend this book to those who feel like they are a 'loser'.


So to speak, this is a record of the life he loved.

This book contains the elementary school days of Kim Yeon-su, the son of a baker who knows that holidays, public holidays, and vacations are the main topics, and the high school days of Kim Yeon-su, who goes to the bookstore to be comforted and suppress her tears.
There is Kim Yeon-su, who praises the beauty of close friends being able to be together without having to talk to each other, but still being lost in their own thoughts, and there is Kim Yeon-su, a father who quietly envies the joy of his daughter who is obsessed with Doraemon.
At first glance, each moment of his life recorded may seem ordinary, but if you read the writing with just a little more focus, you can feel how preciously he remembers his life.


Especially last fall, I couldn't take my eyes off the sky for even a moment.
The clouds were surprisingly beautiful.
I think it was really strange, I was looking at the clouds like that and I thought they were really beautiful, and at that very moment when I thought the clouds were beautiful, I felt like I was alone in the universe.
(Omitted) The sky changed every moment.
When I looked at it, the beauty soon disappeared.
By repeatedly experiencing beauty that does not last long, I came to understand the passage of time.
Beauty and time were complementary.
If it's not going to disappear soon, it's not beautiful.
On the one hand, if you don't feel beauty, you can't sense the passage of time.
In that sense, I come to the conclusion that life cannot help but become beautiful because we all die in the end.

―From the text

Through this book, he consistently talks about how there are countless days to live, but they will all end someday, and how we will encounter many coincidences and have various experiences in the future, but today is only one day.

It also warmly informs us that the happiness and joy that many people desire and hope for do not exist separately, but rather come to us immediately when we open our senses and change our thoughts.
This opens the way for you to get a little closer to your true life.

Throughout the writing there is a cheerful indifference and a love that is not seething but never seems to cool.
His delicate approach to expressing profound emotions about life with even greater simplicity prompts all who read this book to ask themselves, "What world am I living in now? What do I feel in this life?"

Furthermore, it leads them all to observe, feel and love their own lives.
This one book becomes the starting point for someone who reads and listens to the world.

Remember that the most important thing in life is to keep living.

For Kim Yeon-su, her forties are a time of transition in her life.
He confesses that as he entered middle age, he became somewhat distant from emotions such as compassion, empathy, and sympathy.
We live by changing little by little and steadily.
At a certain turning point, when looking at the same work of art, the feeling you get now is different from before.


This turning point is where you can go slowly and if it gets too difficult, you can stop and take a break.
So, we don't push others to become losers in life because they can't live a little faster.
However, one important thing here is whether you just 'run' or 'lag behind'.
In other words, it is asking whether one runs voluntarily or involuntarily.
Kim Yeon-su says that running because you want to run is running, but running because you don't want to run but are forced to because of others is 'running behind'.
They say that it is difficult to live only doing what you want to do, but it is not difficult to not fall behind.
And if you have achieved a life of your own free will, I recommend that you think of it as 'living life once more.'


Because the most important thing in life is not stability, but continuing to live.
In this way, he encourages everyone to experience more, not be anxious about chance, and truly see, hear, and run through life.
Because that is exactly what ‘not supporting’ means.

Besides this, there are stories of time travel in this book.
It contains memories of his childhood, including events at Jjikisa (or Jikjisa), the only theme park in Gimcheon where he visited with his entire family during his childhood; autobiographical stories of his youth spent in turmoil; and his experiences after becoming a novelist and entering his 40s.


If we follow the ten thousand thoughts of Kim Yeon-su that we read, listen to, see, write, and realize in our daily lives, such as thoughts that came to us while drinking beer, visiting the library, or observing the changing seasons, we can feel our inner thoughts deepening before we know it.