Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

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

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.

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

When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better

You can't eat straight A's.

I was speaking well because I was talking to her; there are people who dry up language.

As they walked back to the laundry, Brave Orchid showed her sister where to buy the various groceries and how to avoid Skid Row. "On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days." On weak days you notice bodies on the sidewalk, and you are visible to Panhandler Ghosts and Mugger Ghosts.

Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants - always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor's not swept, the ironing's not ready, the money's not made. I would be still young if we lived in China. (1983: 98)

Upon Good Earth, lay the body down,
open the mouth wide, let song rush through.

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

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

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

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.

It's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.

His Good list outstripped the Evil list; Good may always preponderate in this method of reckoning.

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.

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

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 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.

…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –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.

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 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.

Children, everybody, here's what to do during war: 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.

To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive ... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful' ... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness ... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed ... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92).
For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts

And I had to get out of hating range.

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.

This is the most important thing about me
I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

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.

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.

I regret always writing, writing. I gave
my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,
so i could have 20 minutes to write.
I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing.
I did swab her mouth with water, and feel
her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden
and die. Before I had language,
before I had stories, I wanted to write.
That desire is going away.
I've said what I have to say.
I'll stop and look at things I called
distractions. Become a reader of the world,
no more writer of it.

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.

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

Gods you avoid won't hurt you.

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

My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the field and eats food left for the gods.

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. (1983: 61)

In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans. Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outfits, a different one for each photograph that he sent from America. (1983: 59)

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.

Mothers who love their children take them along.

The Chinese did not admire a bent back; goddesses and warriors stood straight. Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched.

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.

Probably all babies, having recently been nothing, have a tenuous hold on life.

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

My job is my own only land.

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

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

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

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?

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.

What are you going to do for a living? Yea, you're going to have to work because you can't be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That's all you are if you don't talk. If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair. You've got to let people know you have a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life? You think you'll always have your big sister? You think somebody's going to marry you, is that it? Well you're not the type that gets dates, let alone gets married. Nobody's going to notice you. And you have to talk for interviews, speak right up in front of the boss. Don't you know that?