57+ Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes On Education, Writing And Discovery

Maxine Hong Kingston is an American author and professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is best known for her award-winning books The Woman Warrior and China Men, which blend autobiography with old Chinese folktales. Her works explore the experiences of Chinese Americans and the clash of Chinese and American cultures. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Maxine Hong Kingston on love, education, writing.

Top 10 Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

1. In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
5. 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.
6. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.
7. The difference between mad people and sane people... is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.
8. There can't be a pure myth, especially when the myth has been handed down in the oral tradition. As the stories are told, they change. If the stories don't change they just die.
9. We seem to be always on cusps. Women come out of the burkah, the niqab, purdah, the closet, then go back in again. Of course, what we need do is to value the happy freedom of all beings.
10. 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.

Maxine Hong Kingston Short Quotes

• I learned to shoot more accurately because my teachers held the targets.
• When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.
• Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
• What does old look like? Sometimes I am wrinkled, sometimes not.
• I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.
• How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
• Adultery is extravagance.
• You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'
• And I had to get out of hating range.
• Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes About Ways

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

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." — Maxine Hong Kingston

When I am composing, I try to clear my mind of having to publish, or having to sell a book or find readers. That kind of thinking gets in the way. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are 'report a crime' and 'report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance-not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. — 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

People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship. — Maxine Hong Kingston

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. — 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 learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. — 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

I am confirmed in my belief that war is utter destructive violent chaos. There is no "art," no "order(s)," no "just war." No matter what the ideologies, wars are the same. — 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

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

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. — 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

My job is my own only land. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound — Maxine Hong Kingston

To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so theydon't have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year's Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of flowers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life. — Maxine Hong Kingston

I'd like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. — Maxine Hong Kingston

I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired. — Maxine Hong Kingston

In a time of destruction, create something. — Maxine Hong Kingston

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 — Maxine Hong Kingston

No husband of mine will say, "I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is." Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill. — Maxine Hong Kingston

You're too young to decide to live forever. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Hunger also changes the world - when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Any merchant who advertises 'Honest Scales' must have been thinking about weighing them. — Maxine Hong Kingston

There's something in life that's a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it. — Maxine Hong Kingston

I'm so proud that my offspring became a musician. I'm full of awe that we are able to have a whole family live the life of artists. — Maxine Hong Kingston

We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment. — Maxine Hong Kingston

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? — Maxine Hong Kingston

You can't eat straight A's. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Gods you avoid won't hurt you. — Maxine Hong Kingston

...I've learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them-business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Life Lessons by Maxine Hong Kingston

1. Maxine Hong Kingston's work emphasizes the power of storytelling as a way to preserve culture and identity.
2. She also highlights the importance of understanding and appreciating one's heritage and the value of embracing diversity.
3. Through her writing, Kingston encourages readers to explore the complexities of their own experiences and to challenge traditional notions of identity.