Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

In a time of destruction, create something.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

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

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

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

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.

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

We seem to be always on cusps. Women come out of the burkah, the niqab, purdah, the closet, then go back in again. Of course, what we need do is to value the happy freedom of all beings.

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

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.

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

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

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

You're too young to decide to live forever.

Adultery is extravagance.

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

You can't eat straight A's.

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

And I had to get out of hating range.

Gods you avoid won't hurt you.

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

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.

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

The way I'm going now is to focus on peace, to create peace. As Sister Corita said, "I don't go to anti-war rallies. I go to peace rallies."

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.

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

...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'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.

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.

My job is my own only land.

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.

I am confirmed in my belief that war is utter destructive violent chaos. There is no "art," no "order(s)," no "just war." No matter what the ideologies, wars are the same.

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

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

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.

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft

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.