Quotes from Maxine Hong Kingston

And I had to get out of hating range.

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.

Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat.

Mothers who love their children take them along.

The black well of sky and stars went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to disappear.

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 word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:

When these pictures burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened. She got to her feet to fight better

Children, everybody, here's what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

If only I could let my mother know the list, she —and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again.

But the men—hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil—had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home.

His Good list outstripped the Evil list; Good may always preponderate in this method of reckoning.

Once you open your eyes in the water, you become a flying creature....How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.

I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. "Bad girl," my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands - 'Send money' - and prosperity for ever - 'Put food in front of this picture.' My mother does not understand Chinese- American snapshots. 'What are you laughing at?' she asks. (1983: 58)

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action.

The whole world lived inside the gourd, the earth a green and blue pearl like the one the dragon plays with.

I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep.

Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.

Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food.

All heroes are bold toward food.