Maxine Hong Kingston famous quotes

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

#Years #Want #Pages

In a time of destruction, create something.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Hope #Destruction

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

#Together #Stories #Conflict

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

#Differences #Mad #People

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

#Women #Mean #Ideas

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Fishes

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

#Feelings #Demand #Watches

Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Order #Long #Rope

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

#Rooms #Daydreaming #Mess

In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#School #Community #Peaceful

Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#People #Path #Crosses

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

#Ideas #Ephemeral #Definitions

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

#Teaching #Mind #Rooms

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

#Hard Work #Sweat #Grace

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

#Beautiful #Country #Gratitude

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Ocean #Dragons #Oysters

My job is my own only land.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Jobs #Home #Land

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Girl #Hurt #Feet

To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so theydon't have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year's Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of flowers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#New Year #Work #Flower

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Girl #Children #Stranger

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

#Book #Thinking #Mind

Adultery is extravagance.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Infidelity #Extravagance #Adultery

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

#Stories #Oral Tradition

I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Ugly #May #Retarded

And I had to get out of hating range.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Hate #Range

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

#Mother #Said

You're too young to decide to live forever.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Forever #Young #Live Forever

You can't eat straight A's.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

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

#Sex #Lying #Men

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

#Parent #Jam #Stuff

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

#Sex #Race #Definitions

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Joy

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

#Mother #Justice #Childhood

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

#Sky #Together #Earth

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

#Philosophical #Trying #Curtains

What does old look like? Sometimes I am wrinkled, sometimes not.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Looks #Doe #Sometimes

Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#World #Hunger #Eating

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Learning #Home #Dark

The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are 'report a crime' and 'report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance-not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Inspiring #Revenge #People

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

#Hurt #People #Ancestry

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

#Marriage #Daughter #Husband

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

#Ocean #Sleep #Eye

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

#Order #People #Childhood

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

#Live Life #Artist #Musician

I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Writing #Stories

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

#Writing #Culture #Feels

Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
-- Maxine Hong Kingston

#Feet #Dangerous