Top 65 Hong Kingston Quotes
#1. 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
#2. His Good list outstripped the Evil list; Good may always preponderate in this method of reckoning.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#3. 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
#6. When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better
Maxine Hong Kingston
#7. When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. It's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#28. 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
#29. The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#30. Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#31. 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
#33. I was speaking well because I was talking to her; there are people who dry up language.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#39. 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
#41. When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#51. There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#53. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#54. 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
#55. I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#56. For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:
Maxine Hong Kingston
#57. 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
#58. Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Probably all babies, having recently been nothing, have a tenuous hold on life.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#62. 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
#63. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#65. Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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