Best 11 quotes of Ling Ma on MyQuotes

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.

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. Pg 275

I 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.

In the midst of this imagining, I heard, out from nowhere, the distant sound of sleigh bells. I was going crazy. But there, right in front of me, across the street, was a horse – chestnut, with white spots – trotting down the street. It trotted long purposefully, cheerfully, unhurried, down Broadway. Holding my breath, I managed to find my phone and snap a photo before it disappeared from sight…. I uploaded the photo I just took. I added a caption: If a horse rides through Times Square and no one is there to see it, did it actually happen? If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening? I clicked Publish. Pg 253

It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others' knowledge of him. That was freedom.

New York has a way of forgetting you.

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

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.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out? Pg 290

Whenever she’d get mad, she’d take her index finger out 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 (Thank you! I yelled. Scissors! I screamed). Pg 184

You're a nice couple. Whatever you're fighting about, it's not worth it. She looked worriedly outside. A storm, you know, these forces of nature, they put things into perspective.