Top 90 Ling Ma Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Ling Ma

2. “The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.”

— Ling Ma

3. “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

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

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

6. “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

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

— Ling Ma

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Ling Ma

12. “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

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

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

25. “A second chance doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.”

— Ling Ma

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Ling Ma

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed.”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

34. “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

35. “Another self was needed to move into the future.”

— Ling Ma

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Maybe you don’t know that you’re wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back.”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

43. “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

44. “Right before sleep when the brain is at its most porous and absorbs everything and weeps chemicals indiscriminately, I must have been deep in his reminiscing, his intricate, lacelike memories inlaid in me. I have been here in another lifetime.”

— Ling Ma

45. “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

46. “Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.”

— Ling Ma

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

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