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Quote by Ling Ma

“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.”

Quote by Ling Ma

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Severance

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Ling Ma

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“That is the work of your teenage years - to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly... They do not tell you this when you are fourteen, because the people who would tell you - your parents - are the very ones who built the thing you're so dissatisfied with. They made you how they want you. They made you how they need you. They built you with all they know, and love - and so they can't see what you're not: all the gaps you feel leave you vulnerable. All the new possibilities ony imagined by your geenration, and nonexistent to theirs. They have done their best... but now it's up to you, small, brave future, to do your best with what you have.”

“Children run away from problems. Children hide. I didn't want to remain a child. I couldn't help but think back to when Olive had rescued me...I could see now that she'd saved me in 1941 precisely because she had known that I was still a child. She could tell that I was not yet someone who was accountable for her own actions...Olive had seen me for what I was - an immature and unformed girl, who could not yet be expected to stand in the painful field of honor. I had needed a wise and caring adult to save me, and Olive had been that champion. She had stood in the field of honor on my behalf. But I had been young then. I wasn't young anymore. I would have to do this myself. But what would an adult - a formed person, a person of honor - do in this circumstance? Face the music, I suppose. Fight her own corner...Forgive somebody perhaps. But how?...British army engineers during the Great War, who used to say: We can do it, whether it can be done or not. Eventually, all of us will be called upon to do the thing that cannot be done. That is the painful field...”

“It is true that we are the descendant of our circumstances, but it is also true that we are the patrons of own improvement. Blaming the past without taking charge of the present is like driving a car cursing the rear-view mirror and shutting our eyes to the road ahead. - On Self Fulfillmen”