Quotes from Maxine Hong Kingston

You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'

In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.

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

My job is my own only land.

When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.

In a time of destruction, create something.

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.

Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.

I learned to shoot more accurately because my teachers held the targets.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I was speaking well because I was talking to her; there are people who dry up language.

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.

You must not tell anyone, what I am about to tell you.

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)

How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

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.

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.

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. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.

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.