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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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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
Hurt
Also
Ancestry
People
Chase
Ancestor
Reverse
Worship
Comfort
Dead

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In a time of destruction, create something.
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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.
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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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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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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
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You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
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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.
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Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
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I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
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You can't eat straight A's.
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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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My job is my own only land.
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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.
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