Top 90 Ling Ma Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”

— Ling Ma

2. “Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.”

— Ling Ma

3. “New York has a way of forgetting you.”

— Ling Ma

4. “When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.”

— Ling Ma

5. “I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.”

— Ling Ma

6. “So, I said, searching. Tell me about what you do. I regretted it as soon as I asked. It was the question everyone asked everyone else in New York, so careerist, so boring.”

— Ling Ma

7. “Once, in sixth-grade history, we watched a documentary on King Tut. When the archaeologists first opened his tomb, they heard a loud tearing sound, like a knife gashing through cloth. It was the sound of all the textiles inside the tomb, the imperial fabrics, ripping at the sudden exposure to fresh air.”

— Ling Ma

8. “The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.”

— Ling Ma

9. “The fruits of my immigrant father’s lifelong efforts would be gobbled up and squandered by me, his lazy, disaffected daughter.”

— Ling Ma

10. “I emptied myself, lost myself in the work. I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.”

— Ling Ma

11. “To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.”

— Ling Ma

12. “Because people change. Feelings can be temporary and fickle. That’s why it’s important to anchor intent to something serious, extravagant.”

— Ling Ma

13. “It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to do with buying things:.”

— Ling Ma

14. “I tried to observe this feeling of shock, to observe its difference, but in fact I couldn’t detect any difference from all the other days that blurred together on this road trip. I couldn’t point to any deviation from the routine, everyday feeling, which was nothing. I didn’t feel anything.”

— Ling Ma

15. “Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories.”

— Ling Ma

16. “His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them. He didn’t get t to enjoy his life nearly enough.”

— Ling Ma

17. “When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge.”

— Ling Ma

18. “A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.”

— Ling Ma

19. “Humans are animals too, are they not? When an animal is sick, it goes alone by itself to find a quiet place in the woods and rests, for days, for weeks. Sometimes it cannot overcome its illness, but many times it can. The resting, the quiet, and being alone is enough. This is the way of nature. Nature corrects itself.”

— Ling Ma

20. “To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time.”

— Ling Ma

21. “A woman sat alone at her dining table, reading and drinking a cocktail. It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.”

— Ling Ma

22. “Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right.”

— Ling Ma

23. “Seeing moonlight here at my bed and thinking it’s frost on the ground, I look up, gaze at the mountain moon, then back, dreaming of my old home.”

— Ling Ma

24. “It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.”

— Ling Ma

25. “Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.”

— Ling Ma

26. “We spoke until our voices grew hoarse, deepening and breaking and fissuring. It lasted early into morning. Our bodies curled inward, away from each other, dry leaves at the end of summer.”

— Ling Ma

27. “All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.”

— Ling Ma

28. “New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.”

— Ling Ma

29. “I really, really want to catch him. I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.”

— Ling Ma

30. “We Googled is there a god, clicked I’m Feeling Lucky, and were directed to a suicide hotline site.”

— Ling Ma

31. “Or like when we follow the Facebook profiles of our exes, Rachel said. We’re broken up but we never really break up. I never totally forget the past because I’m seeing it on my Facebook wall every day. You can never reinvent yourself because your social media identity is set.”

— Ling Ma

32. “Both of my parents talked to themselves in English routinely, reenacting conversations with American acquaintances, colleagues, the car wash attendant, the grocery cashier, while they mindlessly washed the dishes or vacuumed or washed their faces in the bathroom. They were performing their Americanness, perfecting it to a gleaming hard veneer to shield over their Chinese inner selves. Please and sank you.”

— Ling Ma

33. “Robert Polidori photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a ghost town that formerly housed the nuclear-plant workers. Or the Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre images of Detroit, the images of abandoned auto plants and once-grand theaters. And the Seph Lawless images of the vacant, decrepit shopping malls that closed after the 2008 crash.”

— Ling Ma

34. “I wake up. It is so silent. I could fall through the cracks of such silence.”

— Ling Ma

35. “The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly. He eats all the food and doesn’t share. What lesson does that teach children? To eat with no – he paused, searching for the word – no conscience?”

— Ling Ma

36. “In this dream, I can’t speak. I try to open my lips, but I have none. I have no mouth, and even if I did, I have no language.”

— Ling Ma

37. “The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers.”

— Ling Ma

38. “Oh my god, I lard you so much, he said from across the table, through a mouthful of cookies. Lol, I said.”

— Ling Ma

39. “The seriousness of the epidemic varied depending on which news source you trusted.”

— Ling Ma

40. “I’m laughing because I have never had a personal conversation with Adam in all this time and he is telling me what to do. That’s pretty funny.”

— Ling Ma

41. “A part of me wanted to remonstrate with her, to list out all her infractions in a final accounting, but the last days are for relief, not for truth.”

— Ling Ma

42. “I have seen his face in its many variations. I have seen it when he’s angry, when he’s satisfied, when he tries to project control. I have been on his good side and his bad side. It is a face I have spent a lot of time trying to read, trying to appeal to, trying to capitulate to, trying to pretend for. I have always positioned myself in relation to him, thinking I could toe the line, thinking it would be fine if I just cooperated, thinking if only I compressed myself a little more.”

— Ling Ma

43. “She thought that maybe that serenity was inherited from my father, but it was actually, I wanted to say, a quality owed entirely to her. It had to do with the way she managed our days, so steady and constant and regulated. I have looked for that constancy everywhere.”

— Ling Ma

44. “Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.”

— Ling Ma

45. “We were brand strategists and property lawyers and human resources specialists and personal finance consultants. We didn’t know how to do anything so we Googled everything.”

— Ling Ma

46. “What is the internet but collective memory? Anything that had been done before we could do better.”

— Ling Ma

47. “There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.”

— Ling Ma

48. “Especially the deep, post-holiday extremes of January and February, when, no longer buoyed by festivities and merriments, you’re confronted with the empty expanse of a new year, discarded resolutions in your wake, resigned to your own inability to change.”

— Ling Ma

49. “What if I dissected my feelings, pulled them apart and brutalized them so that he would know they were true? Is this enough? I’d ask. How about this? They would explode and drip over everything like bodily fluids and finally he’d be forced to look away.”

— Ling Ma

50. “At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way.”

— Ling Ma