Quote

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
Years
Twelve
Life
Prose
Poem
Pages
Begin
Poet
Easiness
Poetry
Labored
Thousand
Brevity

More quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston

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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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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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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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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There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Adultery is extravagance.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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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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
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I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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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In a time of destruction, create something.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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You can't eat straight A's.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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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My job is my own only land.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston