Ling Ling Huang > Quotes

“Beauty has always been one of the only ways women have been able to access power, and I can’t fault any of them for wanting more of it.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“Society wants us to look for the approval of men in everything we do. Self-care is the radical act of dressing and living for ourselves.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“I had always assumed love carried itself easily through various permutations and disintegrations. Now I find myself disassociating them from the people I had known my parents to be. I can't decide which is worse, coming up against the limitations of their souls or the limitations of my love.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“In the classical music field, it’s still more permissible for women to be mediocre than it is for them to be fat.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“I study her the way an overeager student studies a poem, committing it to memory because comprehension is out of reach.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“His whole business model privileges the already privileged. Those who can spend exorbitant amounts of time and money on self-care and making themselves beautiful.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“I can’t decide which is worse, coming up against the limitations of their souls or the limitations of my love.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“Customers who are fully satisfied require no further satisfaction. They must be sold a version of themselves that is constantly just out of reach. I believe in the same approach for music. Too harmonious, and everyone falls asleep. It’s the sheer grip, that bit of nail, that has always made my playing what it is. That fine line between beauty and ugliness, ripeness and rot, is what keeps an audience listening with held breath.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“At last, the land of opportunity has stretched an exclusive hand toward me. Is this how my parents felt, landing on the tarmac of a new and unfamiliar country, trying to twist their tongues in a new language? Afraid and lonely, yet powerful?”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“People respond to jealousy in so many different ways. Some people use it as fuel or ammunition. They get more competitive, and they can become very successful with the engine that jealousy gives them. Others aren’t so lucky, and they get mired in pettiness and toxicity. These are often people who feel a good amount of entitlement. There are also those who can’t handle it at all. They withdraw slowly, depressed, unwilling or unable to find a space for themselves. In actuality, there is room for everyone, but the market benefits from an illusion of scarcity.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“I try not to laugh out loud. What could the girl in front of me possibly know about wanting to be beautiful?”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“I feel a stab of resentment before reason kicks in. I work to rid myself of the envy I so often felt in grade school and at the Conservatory for those who are half Asian, reminding myself that it doesn’t necessarily guarantee more assimilation.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“Everyone is jealous, but they find a way through it. Not you. You nursed your envy. Used it to punish yourself. I saw how that toxicity bled into our relationship and made it one of comparison. And because you placed me so high, you could necessarily only be low and constantly wanting. Desperate enough to betray me again and again.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“No woman escapes pregnancy unscathed. No matter how wonderful they are, offspring gorge on our perfect bodies and alter them forever. I had a husband and children. Did he look at me after I got pregnant? Of course not. He left me disfigured and impoverished. If I hadn’t met Victor then, I would have killed myself.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“If jealousy was like a well, I’d never reached the bottom, hadn’t realized the well was a tunnel to the mother of envy, which is awe.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“This observer flits through and between these images and sees that the Enka recorded in this mind is at odds with the one Enka knows herself to be. This Enka is wise, powerful, and calm. This Enka is intelligent, thoughtful, and wildly creative. And where Enka has always thought of Mathilde as a bird at great height, soaring ever farther away from her, the observer now sees that Mathilde believes Enka to be just as mysterious. A sunk stone in the depths of the ocean that she longs to uncover, holding her breath longer to dive deeper each time.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“artists create works of art; geniuses curate an emotional response.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“What an unbelievable scam it is to get everything you've been told to want.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“I would choose her over any world or life where she didn’t exist.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“Even though they had so little money, my parents always managed to provide me with not only necessities but even luxuries. It hurts that I am failing them now when they need me.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“It’s unfortunate that I can undermine months of parental reassurance in just a few seconds, but it’s probably better for kids to learn early on that yes, monsters are real.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“If our lives were to be defined by inaccessibility, we could recontextualize that definition as a choice. A distaste for the interests of those who could afford to have interests. Art, which had never been truly democratic to begin with, was now an
unattainable interest.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“The internet stopped being a place to connect with others or to exchange knowledge, and became a way to perform belonging in the world you had inherited.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“I enjoy the immense freedom that comes with being safe from desire. And it is a kind of power to embrace ugliness and its possibility of expression, so much more imaginative than beauty.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“What's so bad about derivation? Isn't everything derived? We just usually call it "in conversation with". Is it even possible to really copy someone? If someone tried their hardest to mimic another person, their unique life experiences and skills would still yield completely different results.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“She isn’t just bloated. Buttery discolored skin has begun to puddle around her joints, not yet settling in. Even her feet have a layer of pudge on the top, each toe inflated, ending with a jagged broken-off nail. She focuses on me with bleary eyes. “You have to stop.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“It took a long time for me to understand that only people who have had nothing feel the need to keep everything.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“My lips steadily inflate, reminding me of the air mattress I sleep on every night.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty

“The paranoia and processing eventually give way to something else: relief that someone knows the whole awful truth. Relief at finally owning every terrible thing I’ve done. And if she knows the worst of me, she must also know the best. She must know with certainty the love I’ve always had for her. But what good is a love like mine? I used my love again and again as an excuse, as absolution for the sins I committed against her. How much better would her life have been if I had hated her, or at least been indifferent? Whether or not she meant it to be, her presence becomes guidance, and shows me the only way forward.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“Looking back, it seems like I had instinctively known that the most effective place to prune myself was at the roots.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Natural Beauty