Where Waters Meet Quotes

“What’s remembered gets a life, she read once in a book. She didn’t want to give that beast a life, but she couldn’t kill her memory either. Memory exists on its own terms and decides what life to give.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“She didn’t want to become Mother, spending the best of her years practicing conservation and economy, shushing emotions as she did noise, dispensing a pitiful trickle of love when summoned, forever fearful of overspending and bankruptcy. She wanted to love, with a love so intense, so mad, and so mindless that her innards would hurt. For that she would give everything and hold nothing back.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

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― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“There is a child in all old people. The lock guarding the passage from mind to tongue, overused and rusty, now no longer holds. They speak their mind. Children are cruel, and old children, brutal.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Stop thinking your bad thoughts. Bad thoughts lead to bad luck, they are the root of all the bad things.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“outlive. To outlive the rain that dug holes into the skin, to outlive the bayonet that hissed in her dreams, to outlive the long nights infested with mosquitoes, bedbugs, and penises, and to outlive the gawky, cruel age of sixteen.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Silence was powerful; they both knew that and used it to unsettle, but not to be unsettled.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Her life, all sixteen years of it, was a cancellation process, love canceled out by guilt, pride by shame, the future by the past.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Her life, all sixteen years of it, was a cancellation process, love”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Too late, death outruns everything, including truth.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“But we have to trust our own memory, otherwise we crumble.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Things have a strange way of working themselves out, he concluded. Force and reaction, pressure and endurance. In the sphere of marital science, one needs chemistry to kick open the door, but after that, it’s physics that governs the running of it. The”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“After all, if one has lived during one’s lifetime in several places that can be loosely termed home, why should death restrict one to a single and final resting place?”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Memory is subjective, so in that sense we are all gaslighting others somewhat when we assert our version of the past. But we have to trust our own memory, otherwise we crumble.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“No longer held in place by the force of gravity, drifting in an indolent, purposeless nonchalance, she watched herself helplessly slipping away from reality, further and further with every passing day.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“It would take twenty more years for her to wise up and accept the plain truth that every daughter in the world loathes but nevertheless ends up living: the life of her mother.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“No matter how fast a daughter runs, a mother can always catch up, Yuan Feng realized, with a bitterness bordering on despair. A mother’s love knows neither timing nor boundaries and will always make itself known—one can rest assured—in the wrong place and at an inopportune moment.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Waking up in the morning and putting on the old, stinky knitted socks, she found herself with a colossal hangover. Her misery, with nowhere to go, was ready to explode.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“He still read—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Milton, Whitman—not from physical books, as they were banned, but from the lines etched into his memory, which he could retrieve, in meditation, accurate to the last punctuation mark.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“When there was no shame, there was no fear, hence no hurt.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“instantly drying up the surging of her moistened womanhood.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“People believe what they choose to believe. Memory is subjective, so in that sense we are all gaslighting others somewhat when we assert our version of the past.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Hunger teaches us skills in a day that would otherwise take us twenty years to learn.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“But time has a way of dealing with things. The hurt left a wound, then the wound grew a scar, and the scar, in turn, hardened into a callus. The mind became numb over time, and life went on.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“for everything she wanted, there would be something else she had to give up, as the price.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“Did Mother know that it was her last night when she went to bed?”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“In the sphere of marital science, one needs chemistry to kick open the door, but after that, it’s physics that governs the running of it.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet

“She was the busiest lonely old lady.”
― Zhang Ling, Where Waters Meet