Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

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

In a time of destruction, create something.

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.

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You can't eat straight A's.

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

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

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