|
d273694
|
This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.
|
|
reading
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
69165e5
|
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
e7a09f4
|
You can't eat straight A's.
|
|
poverty
school
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
f0a1484
|
Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
778fe8c
|
We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
75770bc
|
You're too young to decide to live forever.
|
|
philosophy-of-life
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
789fe6f
|
I'm going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. There's nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I'm smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I've already applied. I'm smart. I can do all sorts of things. I know how to get A's, and they say ..
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
380b900
|
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 |
|
ee26414
|
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 |
|
47318d7
|
Hunger also changes the world--when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
0484503
|
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.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
d674ef6
|
Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
490f0be
|
She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
1a0653e
|
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 |
|
d5cc333
|
it's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
261c275
|
When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
0bdb2b8
|
I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
be61a30
|
It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips - biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)
|
|
reading
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
8d1669e
|
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 |
|
fa432e3
|
Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
|
|
assimiliation
culture
culture-identity
emigrants
immigrants
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
454ca88
|
I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." -Maxine Hong Kingston"
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
5ea796f
|
My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the field and eats food left for the gods.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
1c9595e
|
Upon Good Earth, lay the body down, open the mouth wide, let song rush through.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
db5c400
|
Because joy and life exist nowhere but the present.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
95eb29a
|
Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
a4bc3ee
|
You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
ed124e0
|
The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. (1983: 61)
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
d4bbe53
|
Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants - always somebody somewher..
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
99ff26b
|
How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
de6f3c8
|
If you should decide during your old age that you would like to live another five hundred years, come here and drink ten pounds of this sap," they told me. "But don't do it now. You're too young to decide to live forever."
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
f6385e6
|
I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows, so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing. I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Beco..
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
6bc7606
|
Trong thoi dai cua su huy diet, hay tao ra mot dieu gi do. Mot bai tho. Mot cuoc dieu hanh. Mot tinh ban. Mot cong dong. Mot dia diem thuoc ve tai san chung. Mot ngoi truong. Mot loi hua. Mot nguyen tac dao duc. Mot khoanh khac yen binh.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
f9d2659
|
In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans. Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outfits, a different one for each photograph that he sent from America. (1983: 59)
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
2add112
|
A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.
|
|
snow
space
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
eaf1ee6
|
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. Then I get bitter: no one supports me."
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
636698d
|
And I had to get out of hating range.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
f680073
|
Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes....Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
97d238c
|
The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could inven..
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
dde37a0
|
As they walked back to the laundry, Brave Orchid showed her sister where to buy the various groceries and how to avoid Skid Row. "On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days." On weak days you notice bodies on the sidewalk, and you are visible to Panhandler Ghosts and Mugger Ghosts."
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
1248bb0
|
Mothers who love their children take them along.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
d6fc298
|
The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
025541d
|
Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse. Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First best ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does."
|
|
writing-craft
writing-life
writing-process
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
87b2413
|
For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |
|
6c9189e
|
When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better
|
|
|
Maxine Hong Kingston |