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You're too young to decide to live forever.

Maxine Hong Kingston

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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
Decide
Forever
Young
Live

More quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston

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Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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
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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
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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
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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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In a time of destruction, create something.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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
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Adultery is extravagance.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
Maxine Hong Kingston