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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

More quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston

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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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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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Adultery is extravagance.
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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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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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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.
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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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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
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.
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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
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How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
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There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
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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
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We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth we're alive together during the same moment.
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Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
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I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
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 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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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