Maxine Hong Kingston Quotations

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

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.

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.

When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What does old look like? Sometimes I am wrinkled, sometimes not.

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

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.

Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.

You're too young to decide to live forever.

I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.

And I had to get out of hating range.

Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound

Adultery is extravagance.

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

Daughters-in-law lived with their husbands' parents, not their own; a synonym for marriage in Chinese is "taking a daughter-in-law.

Ocean people are very different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes.

My job is my own only land.

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

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.

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.

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.

...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.

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.

Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.

Gods you avoid won't hurt you.

I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.

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

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.

You can't eat straight A's.

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?

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.

I learned to shoot more accurately because my teachers held the targets.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

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.

Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

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.

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

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

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

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.

In a time of destruction, create something.