Severance
Ling Ma
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Memories beget memories. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.”
“What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. 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, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.”
“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.”
“I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality.”
“It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others' knowledge of him. That was freedom.”
“Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.”
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Book Keywords:
rhythms, cities, second-chances, systems, freedom, idealism, nihilism, leisure-time, commuting, economics, living, anonymity, insightful, money, life, economic-system, integrity, capitalism, city-life, work