Top 60 Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

2. “In a time of destruction, create something.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

3. “We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

5. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

6. “You can’t eat straight A’s.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

7. “I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I’m not, I’m not retarded.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

8. “You’re too young to decide to live forever.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

9. “Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

10. “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

11. “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

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

13. “Gods you avoid won’t hurt you.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

14. “Humans are basically good. That’s why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

15. “Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

16. “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

17. “My job is my own only land.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

18. “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

19. “Adultery is extravagance.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

23. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

24. “When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

25. “Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

29. “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

30. “People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

31. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

32. “Mothers who love their children take them along.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

33. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

34. “Hunger also changes the world – when eating can’t be a habit, then neither can seeing.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

35. “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

36. “There’s something in life that’s a curtain, and I keep trying to raise it.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

37. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

39. “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

40. “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

41. “I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

45. “How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

47. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

48. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston

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

— Maxine Hong Kingston

50. “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.”

— Maxine Hong Kingston