Top 90 Ling Ma Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I was enjoying myself, but it was an insulated enjoyment. I was alone inside of it.”

— Ling Ma

52. “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

53. “The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

55. “All the lights were off, and I just lay there, trying to pass the hours before I had to get up and go to work, which was impossible when the night was so loud. My neighbor’s electric air conditioner, the bass pumping from other people’s cars. They were all converging together to say one thing: You are alone. You are alone. You are alone. You are truly and really alone.”

— Ling Ma

56. “If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you.”

— Ling Ma

57. “It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.”

— Ling Ma

58. “Everyone expected to die in debt, and had learned not to mind. It was just a fact of living in a country on the decline.”

— Ling Ma

59. “Oh. I guess I must’ve have forgotten it at my desk, I said, though the truth was that I didn’t wear it that much. I didn’t like the way it made my mouth feel hot and suffocated, a bacterial cesspool. You should be more careful, Blythe chided. It’s company policy for a reason. If the masks actually work, don’t you think maybe there wouldn’t be an epidemic? I asked, facetiously polite.”

— Ling Ma

60. “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. Or whatever. To music, to poetry, to paintings and installations, to TV and the movies. But mostly TV and the movies.”

— Ling Ma

61. “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

62. “On the other side of graduation was her actual life, the slow narrowing of possibilities that would catch her and freeze her in a vocation, a relationship, a life. She intended to avoid that slow calcification for as long as possible – if only by refraining from making any crucial choices. In other words, she was moving back home.”

— Ling Ma

63. “Memories beget memories. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.”

— Ling Ma

64. “Looking at the office workers suspended high above us, I sensed for the first time my father’s desire to leave China and to live in a foreign country. It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.”

— Ling Ma

65. “Everything hurt, but nothing broke skin. It continued this way.”

— Ling Ma

66. “After the End came the Beginning.”

— Ling Ma

67. “Her family would only wound her, nothing more, so that she went through this life maimed, but still she went through life.”

— Ling Ma

68. “As her aunt stroked her forehead, she thought that, yes, finally she understood what a homecoming was supposed to be. It was to be comfortable in a way you couldn’t be elsewhere. It was to be mothered into an oblivious ooze.”

— Ling Ma

69. “I don’t understand this festive mood, Jonathan said, indicating outside the window. Well, they won’t have to work tomorrow, I explained.”

— Ling Ma

70. “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?”

— Ling Ma

71. “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

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

— Ling Ma

73. “Besides, now that all the white people have finally left New York, you think I’m leaving? I smiled. You should put on your blog something about how New York belongs to the immigrants, how it was once the first point of entry for foreigners. The history of it, you know?”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

75. “A morning cup of coffee, bought at the street cart outside the Spectra building. The feeling of walking outside in the summer with just-washed hair. Bodega snacks, like those Sponch marshmallow cookies, with their tiny white and pink marshmallows clustered atop a biscuit. Watching movies with Jonathan and talking late into the night.”

— Ling Ma

76. “A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do.”

— Ling Ma

77. “He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. They’re saying that the military are just shooting into the crowds. The protests are peaceful. He looked at her, stunned. Are you sure that’s right? We’re watching American news.”

— Ling Ma

78. “It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze.”

— Ling Ma

79. “I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality.”

— Ling Ma

80. “It doesn’t take much to convince yourself that you’re doing okay, just some discretionary income and a regularity to your days.”

— Ling Ma

81. “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

82. “You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs – I called it integrity – but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.”

— Ling Ma

83. “I got up. I went to work in the morning. The first thing I did at my desk was surf the news. A flock of dead seagulls was found washed up on Brighton Beach, dredged up with seaweed.”

— Ling Ma

84. “Behind me, Lane and Blythe donned their respirator masks, making jokes about “epidemic fashion.”

— Ling Ma

85. “Despite their physical differences, there is one feature my father and his brother do share. It is the face, a face so eerily similar they could’ve been identical twins. They have the same furrowed brow, the same dimples below the mouth, and the same deep, sunken eyes.”

— Ling Ma

86. “Whatever I felt, whatever this feeling was inside of me, there is no place for it. There is no place for it to go, and I would have to carry it around inside of me for a long time, so long that it would fossilize and become a part of me.”

— Ling Ma

87. “The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the last and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

89. “If you’re lucky enough to find something you’re good at, where people appreciate you, don’t thumb your nose at it. If it’s an issue of salary or benefits, I’m open to discussing it.”

— Ling Ma

90. “They thought we were in shock, I realized. They were treating us as if we were in shock. Then: We were in shock. Probably. This must be shock.”

— Ling Ma