Seoul

Seoul, officially the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea. With surrounding Incheon metropolis and Gyeonggi province, Seoul forms the heart of the Seoul Capital Area, home to roughly half of the country's population. Seoul is ranked as the fourth largest metropolitan economy in the world and is larger than London and Paris.

B

 * Far from being settled, this bright part of Korea screams defiance. And that blast of light, just a short drive from the demilitarized zone, is its defiant capital.
 * Michael Breen, The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 20

H

 * As Paris was for France, Seoul was not simply Korea's largest town. It was Korea. Government was a great vortex summoning men rapidly into it, placing them briefly near the summitry of ambition and then sweeping them out, often ruthless into execution or exile.
 * Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (1968)

K

 * What Seoul represents to [South] Koreans is above and beyond all our hopes, aspirations, and collective imagination. It is the flagship of our nation.
 * Wan-ju Kim, Mayor's Greetings (October 2004)


 * Lying between chill sheets that night in my icy room, I tried to organize my first impressions of Seoul. In the back of my mind I felt that the place reminded me of somewhere I had been before. The impression of gloom and darkness and wildness could not be dispelled ... and everywhere there was the curiously clanging, grumbling tone of Korean speech. From time to time I was reminded of northern Japanese towns in wintertime–Akita, Aomori, Niigata, or Sapporo. But then it flashed into my mind that what Seoul really reminded me of was the Arctic: the bare, freezing desolations on the outskirts of Kiruna and Narvik.
 * James Kirkup, as quoted in The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation (2017), by Michael Breen, p. 40

M

 * It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one.
 * Brian Reynolds Myers, "League Confederation Goes Outer-Track" (24 September 2018), Sthele Press


 * The twin obsessions of the foreign press corps in Seoul are a) North Korea and b) K-Pop, K-Film, K-Anything-But-Politics.
 * Brian Reynolds Myers, "On Foreign Coverage of South Korea’s Response to the Coronavirus" (18 March 2020), Sthele Press