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Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

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
Nowhere
Exist
Joy
Present
Life

More quotes by 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.
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I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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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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And I had to get out of hating range.
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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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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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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
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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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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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You can't eat straight A's.
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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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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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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Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story 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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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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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston