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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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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
Everything
China
Men
Sex
Gave
Choose
Promiscuity
Secret
Commanded
Lying
Lone
Evil
Aunt
Women
Romantic
More quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston
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
I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Adultery is extravagance.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.
Maxine Hong Kingston
And I had to get out of hating range.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.
Maxine Hong Kingston
In a time of destruction, create something.
Maxine Hong Kingston
I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
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.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
Maxine Hong Kingston
You can't eat straight A's.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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
You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
Maxine Hong Kingston
