Best Lines from My Mister
The quietest lines from My Mister, where exhaustion, decency, and small mercies do all the talking.
My Mister rarely raises its voice. It follows Park Dong-hoon, a middle-aged engineer ground down by office politics, and Lee Ji-an, the young temp who first wiretaps him and is slowly undone by his ordinary kindness. The talk happens over tuna and soju in a Hugye-dong pub, on long cold walks home, in flat exchanges that carry years of fatigue underneath. These are the lines a viewer holds onto: not speeches, but the worn, humane things people say when they have stopped pretending. We pulled the ones that stand on their own.
These are lines of dialogue from the series, attributed to the character who speaks them, and shared here for commentary and discussion.
On getting through it
I'm starting to doubt the things that I thought were the pillars that supported me.
Dong-hoon, the structural engineer, names what is failing in his own life using the language of his trade. The next episode repeats the words back as a kind of refrain.
It's okay to fall down.
Dong-hoon says this to Ji-an, who has spent her whole life convinced that one slip means the end. He follows it with the idea that his own life is not over yet.
My life isn't over yet.
Spoken after a stranger taunts him that he is already finished. It is one of the few times Dong-hoon pushes back against his own resignation.
As long as no one knows, it's nothing.
Dong-hoon's repeated creed for surviving humiliation, here reassuring Ji-an after the scandal breaks. It returns across the series as his way of shrinking pain down to a manageable size.
On Ji-an, hardened and thawing
Now that your life is ruined, you are truly lovely.
A loan shark needling a woman whose career he helped destroy, in the same cruel register Ji-an has grown up absorbing. It sets the tone for the world she is trying to climb out of.
Treating me like a person for the first time in my life...
Ji-an describes what Dong-hoon's plain courtesy did to her, after a lifetime of being treated as a debt to collect. She has been eavesdropping on him for months by this point.
I don't care if I get reborn anymore.
Ji-an, who once said she kept being born only to suffer, lets that thread go. It answers the reincarnation talk the neighborhood men trade over drinks.
On the neighborhood and old grudges
Tormenting me is the joy of your life.
Said to the loan shark Gwang-il, who collects on Ji-an's grandmother's debt with relish. It captures the casual everyday cruelty Ji-an has to absorb to survive.
Let's crush the ones we meet for the first time in this life and let's choose not to be born again.
Eldest brother Sang-hoon, the failed film director, turning the men's drunken talk of past lives into a half-joking vow. The brothers keep circling the idea of grudges outliving a single lifetime.
More than 30 people in that neighborhood will run over to help you.
A description of what Dong-hoon's Hugye-dong has that Ji-an has never had: people who show up. It lands during the stretch where she starts to understand the place.
I was always second place because of you.
Dong-hoon's old friend Sang-won, the monk, admitting a lifetime of envy as they finally talk it out. Dong-hoon's reply is that he can start winning now.
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