Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

In a time of destruction, create something.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.