Quote

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth we're alive together during the same moment.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
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
Image
Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
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
Image
Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
And I had to get out of hating range.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Image
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
Image
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