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How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

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
Live
Unlike
Fish
Fishes
Dead

More quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston

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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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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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There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
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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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
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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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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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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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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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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Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
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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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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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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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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.'
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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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
Maxine Hong Kingston