Quotes from Maxine Hong Kingston

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.

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

You can't eat straight A's.

You're too young to decide to live forever.

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

Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.

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.

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.

Hunger also changes the world—when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.

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.

She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.

Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

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.

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.

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

Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.

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.

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.

it's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.

I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I'm not, I'm not retarded.

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.)

Upon Good Earth, lay the body down, open the mouth wide, let song rush through.

Because joy and life exist nowhere but the present.