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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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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
Sleep
Eyes
Eye
Stops
Different
Ears
Never
Ocean
Like
Asking
People
Saying
Land

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In a time of destruction, create something.
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I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
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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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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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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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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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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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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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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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There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
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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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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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Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.
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Adultery is extravagance.
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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.
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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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Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
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You can't eat straight A's.
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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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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
Maxine Hong Kingston