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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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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
Poet
Easiness
Poetry
Labored
Thousand
Brevity
Years
Twelve
Life
Prose
Poem
Pages
Begin

More quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston

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You can't eat straight A's.
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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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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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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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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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
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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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And I had to get out of hating range.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
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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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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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
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In a time of destruction, create something.
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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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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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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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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
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