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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“My screen, that shiny black pool I longed to escape into again and again, even though it filled my mind with the black bile of jealousy and bitterness. The shrinkage. The side-by-side comparison. There was a cultural obsession with the possibility of multiverses, but to me, social media was proof enough of their existence. With a flick of a finger, you could see every life you could have had if only you’d been born smarter or luckier, or made better choices.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The public needs to be shocked and reminded of their own feelings, which everything else in the world seeks to numb. Whatever the purpose of art is, it isn’t to be original for originality’s sake.”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“I had truly believed that if you worked hard enough, with enough creativity and dedication, it was possible to make your way to a greener pasture where everyone made pieces from a place of love and introspection. I had believed that good art prevails. Events like these remind me of money’s total power to control and leech the substance out of everything. Sure, you can be a star in this world, as long as you keep your patrons interested and are willing to compromise everything to make them more money. Not too many women can succeed at one time…just enough to make the rest of us hungry, to believe it’s possible.”
― 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

“Or maybe I was just so insecure that anyone with a strong sense of identity could destabilise me”
― Ling Ling Huang, Immaculate Conception

“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