Maxine Quotes

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. ~ 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

Without imagination, you live in a small room with the windows closed. Imagination opens the windows and shows us landscapes, horizons that we would not otherwise perceive ... I want education to empower people to see possibility. ~ Maxine

I remember the first time I walked on that stage. Maxine and I were just a duet at the time, and we walked on that stage and did 'Looking Back to See.' Ernest Tubb introduced us at the time. I remember my knees were shaking. ~ Jim Ed Brown

You don't need as much as some of the other artists but you do sing with your eyes close and it gives the illusion that you singing in your sleep and number one places around the country, you have to have your eyes open. You can close your eyes for a certain gesture or whatever but your eyes are the mirrors of your soul ... ~ Maxine Powell

Our Parents were gods and monsters at the same time. Maybe we're all like that- gods and monsters ~ Maxine Paetro

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) ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I think he painted the way he did," I answered, "because he had something perfect with Diana."
I braced myself for her next scathing insight and nearly fell over when she reached out to pat my hand. Her wedding ring was a heavy,hammered gold band that could probably pound nails.
"Nothing but the occasional espresso is perfect," she said, not unkindly. "Let me share some wisdom, Willing Girl. Relationships are like Whack-a-Mole. You squash one annoying deformity and another one pops up in no time."
Not your classic sentiment, there. Or a particularly heartening one. It seemed well meant, though, so I figured it might be a good time to inform her, "Um, my name....is Ella. Marino."
"Oh,I know who you are, Miss Marino," she shot back. "Shall I mention again that the Willing Foundation doesn't?"
"No,Dr. Rothaus," I said meekly. "No need."
"Excellent." Dr. Rothaus headed for the door. "You may call me Maxine. Good luck finding something I haven't. And don't cry on the materials. ~ Melissa Jensen

All I'm looking for is a guy who'll do what I want, when I want, for as long as I want, and then go away. Or wait nearby, like a Dust Buster, charged up and ready when needed. ~ Maxine

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

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

…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 ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

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 ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Poetry
makes nothing happen.
It survives
in the valley of its saying. ~ Maxine Kumin

We go to sea repeatedly from Melville's time on - and the image of men at sea, like the image of men in the wilderness, seems to me to be almost an archetypal image of human beings on their own, human beings making their own way, guiding themselves by the stars they can see - rather than by faith or prayer or invisible forces. ~ Maxine Greene

My favorite birthday game is Pin the Cleanup on the guests. ~ Maxine

Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way." For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. "It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me? ~ Clive Barker

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

By today's standards, if you go by the early morning TV misery shows, my broken home family of mixed parentage siblings was quite normal. ~ Hailey Giblin

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I think his accent got me pregnant," Maxine said. "I think I passed out. I need mouth to mouth. Kingsley's mouth," Katie said. "I think I need a trip to Manhattan," Jessika said. "And birth control. Lots of birth control." "I think you all need to go jump in the pond," Nora said. ~ Tiffany Reisz

Life will do anything for a living. ~ Maxine Kumin

Having an achievement mindset is your competitive advantage ~ Maxine Phillips

Mothers who love their children take them along. ~ 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

Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color. And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important. Whether it's their agricultural subsidies, or other kinds of expenditures that are certainly not expenditures for poor people or for people of color. And so we have to band together and keep fighting back. ~ Maxine Waters

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

The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world. ~ Maxine Greene

I don't have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don't find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren't interested in those stories. ~ Maxine Waters

Take every birthday with a grain of salt. This works much better if the salt accompanies a large margarita ~ Maxine

Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape a table to enclose the sitter at it, trapping him like a baby in a high chair or a school boy at his inkwell. ~ Helen Garner

If sequestration takes place, that's going to be a great setback. We don't need to be having something like sequestration that's going to cause these job losses - over 170 million jobs that could be lost, ~ Maxine Waters

It's funny," she said reflectively, "but I always used to think that if only I was slimmer everything in my life would be all right. I didn't realize until it happened that it would just open up a whole new set of problems." ~Maxine ~ W. Soliman

Gods you avoid won't hurt you. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

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) ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

God serves the choosy. They know what to want ... ~ Maxine Kumin

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

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

My job is my own only land. ~ 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

I am forever on the way ~ Maxine Greene

Romance is everything to turn it into a cause for given is priceless ~ Maxine Wilson-Perry

I learned to shoot more accurately because my teachers held the targets. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

If you use a positive word, the corners of your lips go upward and it makes you smile. ~ Maxine Powell

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal will be about socializing ... uh, um ... Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies. ~ Maxine Waters

Going all the way back to Jeremiah Wright and Tavis Smiley and Van Jones and even Shirley Sherrod and maybe even Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel. We're going to see what his [Barack Obama] response is. ~ Cornel West

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. ~ 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

When forces of nature are involved, fate gets all the blame. ~ Maxine Clair

I cant help but notice that you are not wearing a wedding ring, dear lady. Are you, by any chance, looking for a husband?' He smiled eagerly, his drenched hat clinging to his round head.

Looking for a husband? Why?' Grandma Maxine asked. 'Did I lose one? ~ Suzanne Selfors

Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits. ~ Maxine Hancock

In this country, you look at a person, and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilisations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It's taken some getting used to but now Asanka likes it - this casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear. ~ Maxine Beneba Clarke

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

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell. ~ Maxine Kumin

IMAGINE! See it, feel it, believe it!
You can do anything, if you truly believe in yourself."
Ronaldo's Grandad
Former captain of the North Pole Flying Team, and very wise reindeer. ~ Maxine Sylvester

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? ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

You can't eat straight A's. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I've been in this struggle for many years now. I understand racism. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country who don't care about the problems of the inner city. We have to fight every day that we get up for every little thing that we get. And so I keep struggling. ~ Maxine Waters

Indoors, the evening gets you'd say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it's anybody's business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter's clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win. "Yes!" Horst beginning to scream in delighted disbelief. "And it better be Keanu Reeves in the biopic! ~ Thomas Pynchon

I do my housework in the nude. It gives me an incentive to clean the mirrors as quickly as possible. ~ Maxine

You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Wipe your mouth,
there's still a tiny bit of bullshit around your lips. ~ John Wagner

What does old look like? Sometimes I am wrinkled, sometimes not. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine will sometimes compliment us on our hair or other aspects of our scruffy appearance. The next day, or even later the same day, she'll send an all-caps e-mail asking why a certain form is not on her desk. This will prompt a peppy reply, one barely stifling a howl of fear:

Hey Maxine!
The document you want was actually put in your in-box yesterday around lunchtime. I also e-mailed it to you and Russell. Let me know if you can't find it!
Thanks!
Laars

P.S. I'm also attaching it again as a Word doc, just in case.

There's so much wrong here: the fake-vague around lunchtime, the nonsensical Thanks, the quasi-casual postscript. The exclamation points look downright psychotic. ~ Ed Park

I don't think of color, I think that anyone wants a master of their skill and be successful knows no color. ~ Maxine Powell

What you have to be, you have to live whatever you do all day long. I always told the artists, every time you're on stage, it's nothing but a dress rehearsal. ~ Maxine Powell

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

Leeky Shortz says "Live life like your arse is on fire! ~ Maxine Mansfield

When and where there is repression, what a woman does when she gets dressed in the morning may be considered political. Wearing or not wearing a veil, disobeying laws that prohibit transgender dressing, or wearing a large Afro in an institution that seeks to diminish the formation of racial alliances are all actions that can serve as challenges to domination ~ Maxine Leeds Craig

You cannot be successful and continue to be a victim. ~ Maxine Waters

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

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

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

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

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old ~ Maxine Kumin

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

Maxine," Grant said, but I barely heard him. I was lost in that vision, in those emotions - the pain, and hunger for pain, forming the root of so much
agonized rage.
" 'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate,'" I muttered.
"Yoda, from Star Wars?"
" 'Hate leads to suffering.'" I met his gaze. "Yoda knows his shit, man."
Grant's mouth crooked in a gentle smile. ~ Marjorie M. Liu

That's my prescription for a happy marriage - marry someone who doesn't do anything similar to what you do. ~ Maxine Kumin

The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings. ~ Maxine Kumin

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept. ~ Maxine Kumin

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

The anger that you see expressed out there in Los Angeles, in my district this evening, is a righteous anger, and it's difficult for me to say to the people, "Don't be angry." When people are angry and enraged, they do do senseless things. They do act even sometimes out of character, and that's why it is the responsibility of America to try and avoid putting people in these kinds of situations. ~ Maxine Waters

I want the brand gone, Cecile," Lesharo said quietly. "I have no wish to have Ducharme's mark on me. If you will not permit Pierre to do this, will you do it?"
"Ducharme said I should put my own mark on you," she recalled, turning her face away at the memory. "I cannot do what he did."
"His mark is the mark of a pani, set upon me by a man who was less than an animal. I would proudly bear the scar you gave me, for it will be something done to me in friendship. ~ Maxine Tottier

For me, the child is a veritable image of becoming, of possibility, poised to reach towards what is not yet, towards a growing that cannot be predetermined or prescribed. I see her and I fill the space with others like her, risking, straining, wanting to find out, to ask their own questions, to experience a world that is shared. ~ Maxine Greene

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

Probably all babies, having recently been nothing, have a tenuous hold on life. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I think Hillary and Bill are really liberals at heart. I think that, in addition to being liberals, they are very practical. They have made some decisions about what it takes to win. ~ Maxine Waters

Your best thing for you to do is learn how to listen and follow positive guidelines which is a skill and to be determined and consistent and you're going to go places in life not only whether you sing but you're getting a basic finish background to do anything you want to do in life. ~ Maxine Powell

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. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Part of teaching is helping people create themselves. ~ Maxine Greene

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them. ~ Maxine Kumin

As if somehow irony," she recaps for Maxine, "as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious - weakening its grip on 'reality.' So all kinds of make-believe - forget the delusional state the country's in already - must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now."

"Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school." Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko's Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, "Don't tell Ms. Cheung!"

"You notice," Heidi continues, "how 'reality' programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it's so producers shouldn't have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There's more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they're all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view. ~ Maxine Kumin

And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life. ~ Maxine Kumin