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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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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
More quotes by 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
Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
Maxine Hong Kingston
You're too young to decide to live forever.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
Maxine Hong Kingston
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
Maxine Hong Kingston
And I had to get out of hating range.
Maxine Hong Kingston
My job is my own only land.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
Maxine Hong Kingston
