Top 90 Ling Ma Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We Googled is there a god, clicked I’m Feeling Lucky, and were directed to a suicide hotline site.”

— Ling Ma

52. “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

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

— Ling Ma

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Ling Ma

57. “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

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

— Ling Ma

59. “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

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

— Ling Ma

61. “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

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

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

64. “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

65. “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

66. “I was enjoying myself, but it was an insulated enjoyment. I was alone inside of it.”

— Ling Ma

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Ling Ma

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Ling Ma

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “After the End came the Beginning.”

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Ling Ma

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

— Ling Ma

88. “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

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