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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
Life
Nowhere
Exist
Joy
Present

More quotes by 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
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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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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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In a time of destruction, create something.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
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You're too young to decide to live forever.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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And I had to get out of hating range.
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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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I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
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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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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My job is my own only land.
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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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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There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
Maxine Hong Kingston