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Adultery is extravagance.

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
Extravagance
Infidelity
Adultery

More quotes by 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.
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I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.
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And I had to get out of hating range.
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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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My job is my own only land.
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People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
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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.
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In a time of destruction, create something.
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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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How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
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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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Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them.
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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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Gods you avoid won't hurt you.
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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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Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
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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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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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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