Quote

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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Maxine Hong Kingston
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 27
Author
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Chinatown
Stockton
Maxine Ting Ting Hong
People
Control
Organize
Keep
Designed
Another
Attraction
Eludes
Order
Raise
Stubbornly
Cannot
Raises
Elude
Together
Relationships
Sensuality
Whole
Childhood
Bind
Even
Among
Societies

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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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You're too young to decide to live forever.
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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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Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
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Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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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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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
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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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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 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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We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth we're alive together during the same moment.
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And I had to get out of hating range.
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