Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Maxine Hong Kingston
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
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
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
I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.

Maxine Hong Kingston
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
Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.

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

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

Maxine Hong Kingston
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
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
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
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
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
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
We lived on a special spot of the earth, Stockton, the only city on the Pacific coast with three railroads — the Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Western Pacific.... Grandfather left a railroad for his message: We had to go somewhere difficult. Ride a train. Go somewhere important. In case of danger, the train was to be ready for us.

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

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

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

Maxine Hong Kingston
The sisters walked back to Chinatown.... They walked past the vegetable, fish, and meat markets — not as abundant as in Canton, the carp not as red, the turtles not as old — and entered the cigar and seed shop. Brave Orchid filled her sister's thin hands with carrot candy, melon candy, and sheets of beef jerky.

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

Maxine Hong Kingston
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
My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands — 'Send money' — and posterity forever — 'Put food in front of the picture.' My mother does not understand Chinese-American snapshots. 'What are you laughing at?' she asks.

Maxine Hong Kingston