Bliss Montage Quotes

“It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“A boy, at best, can adore his mother, but a girl can understand her. When the doctor told me it was a girl, I thought, Now I will be understood.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“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, Bliss Montage

“Because people change. Feelings can be temporary and fickle. That’s why it’s important to anchor intent to something serious, extravagant.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“A woman sat alone at her dining table, reading and drinking a cocktail. It’d be such a relief to be older already, unburdened by the pressure to leverage your ever-fleeting beauty for whatever.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“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, Bliss Montage

“It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone's gaze.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Another self was needed to move into the future.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Her family would only wound her, nothing more, so that she went through this life maimed, but still she went through life.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“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, Bliss Montage

“It was a time when the future could have been anything, been anywhere. It was so open that it could actually crush her.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“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? They would explode and drip over everything like bodily fluids and finally he'd be forced to look away.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Humans are animals too, are they not? When an animal is sick, it goes alone by itself to find a quiet place in the woods and rests, for days, for weeks. Sometimes it cannot overcome its illness, but many times it can. The resting, the quiet, and being alone is enough. This is the way of nature. Nature corrects itself.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“I really, really want to catch him. I want to masticate him with my teeth. I want to barf on him and coat him in my stinging acids. I want to unleash a million babies inside him and burden him with their upbringing.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Maybe you don't know that you're wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“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, Bliss Montage

“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, Bliss Montage

“In sex, in towel wringing, in dishwashing, as in everything else, he was exactly himself. If being exactly yourself meant you had to suffer the loneliness of being unlike anyone else, he seemed not to mind. The insularity of his lifestyle cradled him.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all. What I was afraid of in myself, I liked in Y.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“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, Bliss Montage

“When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don’t know that you’re wounded until you receive the salve.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage: Stories

“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, Bliss Montage

“Though I loved the sudden, hard clasp of intimacy, I would become dizzy from the divulging, the fervor of psychic bloodletting.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Yet he smirked, just slightly, as if he had heroically chosen to remain resistant in the face of the "system.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“Under What I’m Looking For I put: I want to know someone for longer than a few years. I want to know what that feels like. I also want not to flee. By that I mean I want constancy. I want to be constant.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“How do I know, Adam once asked before he struck me, if what you feel is real? And not something that you felt for everyone else that came before? And everyone that will come after?”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage