Top 65 Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

#1. Adultery is extravagance.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #8616
#2. I'm so proud that my offspring became a musician. I'm full of awe that we are able to have a whole family live the life of artists.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #16508
#3. We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #32261
#4. You can't eat straight A's.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #62822
#5. Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #67791
#6. To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world - that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #116053
#7. Mothers who love their children take them along.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #120646
#8. When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #160244
#9. Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #181275
#10. It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #205019
#11. What does old look like? Sometimes I am wrinkled, sometimes not.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #231106
#12. I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #245149
#13. There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #250409
#14. The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #253430
#15. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #260631
#16. Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #324721
#17. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #339661
#18. There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #348716
#19. Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #371707
#20. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #531281
#21. But the men - hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil - had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #578650
#22. I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #588552
#23. For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #592453
#24. Ocean people are very different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #606325
#25. Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #712731
#26. Daughters-in-law lived with their husbands' parents, not their own; a synonym for marriage in Chinese is taking a daughter-in-law.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #717210
#27. The difference between mad people and sane people ... is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #777547
#28. Probably all babies, having recently been nothing, have a tenuous hold on life.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #830180
#29. My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands - 'Send money' - and prosperity for ever - 'Put food in front of this picture.' My mother does not understand Chinese- American snapshots. 'What are you laughing at?' she asks. (1983: 58)

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #838452
#30. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #840709
#31. And I had to get out of hating range.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #875653
#32. Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #906079
#33. When I am composing, I try to clear my mind of having to publish, or having to sell a book or find readers. That kind of thinking gets in the way.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #917557
#34. I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #935129
#35. Once you open your eyes in the water, you become a flying creature ... How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #935134
#36. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women - to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #970891
#37. You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #972591
#38. When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #984292
#39. It's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1059524
#40. I have found things that I could have done better in 'The Woman Warrior.' But then I thought: Let the work of one's youth just stand.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1098662
#41. I'd like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1101606
#42. The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1111371
#43. Gods you avoid won't hurt you.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1115858
#44. When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1158580
#45. When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1209158
#46. In a time of destruction, create something.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1234649
#47. How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1251347
#48. The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1293531
#49. His Good list outstripped the Evil list; Good may always preponderate in this method of reckoning.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1303552
#50. Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1313740
#51. I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1346469
#52. Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1532222
#53. The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. (1983: 61)

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1603930
#54. No husband of mine will say, "I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is." Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1626180
#55. I learned to shoot more accurately because my teachers held the targets.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1639122
#56. My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1681952
#57. A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1744603
#58. You're too young to decide to live forever.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1752277
#59. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1753090
#60. The Chinese did not admire a bent back; goddesses and warriors stood straight. Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1755207
#61. The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1770323
#62. Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1783521
#63. Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1823478
#64. My job is my own only land.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1848832
#65. I was speaking well because I was talking to her; there are people who dry up language.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes #1853508

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