Quote

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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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
Watches
Blossoms
Watch
Preservation
Playing
Guts
Action
Passings
Feelings
Demands
Work
Passing
Like
Turned
Cherry
Demand
Cherries

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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.
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Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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You can't eat straight A's.
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You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
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My job is my own only land.
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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.
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And I had to get out of hating range.
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Adultery is extravagance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
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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.
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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.
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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
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I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
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How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
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