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

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
Anyone
Tell
Mother
Must

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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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You can't eat straight A's.
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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.
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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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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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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
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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.
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People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
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And I had to get out of hating range.
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In a time of destruction, create something.
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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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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.
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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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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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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
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Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.
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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.
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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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth we're alive together during the same moment.
Maxine Hong Kingston