ZEL > ZEL's Quotes

“People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.”
― Muhammad Asad

“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, Severance

“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, Severance

“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, Severance

“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, Severance

“It is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. 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, Severance

“There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“The city was so big. It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to do with buying things: dinner entrées, cocktails, the cover charge to a nightclub. Then there was the shopping, big chain stores open late, up and down the streets, throbbing with bass-heavy music and lighting. In the Garment District, diminished to a limited span of blocks after apparel manufacture moved overseas, wholesale shops sold fabrics and trinkets imported from China, India, Pakistan. In Jonathan’s apartment, we used to”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even 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, Severance

“I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I wake up. It is so silent. I could fall through the cracks of such silence.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“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, Severance

“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, Severance

“New York has a way of forgetting you.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“What is the internet but collective memory? Anything that had been done before we could do better.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.

Brunch? he echoed skeptically.

Okay, maybe not brunch, I conceded. If not brunch, then something else.

A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. 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. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“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, Severance

“making jokes about “epidemic fashion.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“We Googled is there a god, clicked I’m Feeling Lucky, and were directed to a suicide hotline site.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“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, Severance

“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, Severance

“When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You're not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn't recognize me. That's what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn't know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you?

But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist.

Whenever she'd get mad, she'd take her index finger and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she'd say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car..She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends' birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse.

She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father's Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief. Suffice to say, Zhigang and Ruifang came to know the customs and traditions of Protestant Christianity. They learned biblical stories and verses. They learned the hymns by heart. But the thing that Ruifang found most comforting about this religion was prayer. She prayed, at first imitating others during group prayers, and then eventually on her own, alone in the basement apartment. It was during the afternoons, her vision blurry and fingers stiff and fatigued from hooking wigs, that she sat down at the kitchen table and clasped her hands. It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“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, Severance

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

“You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. 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,”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors. Other survivors, if they existed, must also feel this way. We were ashamed of leaving people behind, of taking our comforts where we could find them, of stealing from those who could not defend themselves. We had known ourselves to be cowards and hypocrites, pernicious liars really, and to find this suspicion confirmed was not a relief but a horror. If the End was Nature’s way of punishing us so that we might once again know our place, then yes, we knew it. If it was at all unclear before, it was not now.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“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, Severance