Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn-omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens-and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. Entertained it. (first lines)

I think that if a person doesn't read, maybe they cannot come out of themselves. You know you delineated a. . .I think a growth process of human development. . .first there is an awareness of the ego, the self, and then of another and many others to become a communal person. And we need to go even beyond that our family, tribe, Chinatown, gang, nation-into a larger selflessness or agape. I think it is a very rare person who will take on public and global responsibilities... Reading and writing should expand and transform the self...must be an essential tool for envisioning and making the world.

All during the Vietnam War, I could feel there was a darkness hanging over the whole world and it lasted for so long.

(What do you think about revenge?) MHK: I come from a culture where revenge is important. So many of the stories and operas I grew up on have that theme of revenge. I think has something to do with justice in our lifetime rather than justice in another reincarnation. But in American culture revenge is really questioned. Christianity says no revenge. The vengeance I will permit myself has to come in a new form. I wrote in The Woman Warrior that the Chinese idiom for "revenge" can also mean "reporting to five families." If you can find the words for an injustice and put it in some artistic shape, and let everyone know, then revenge has taken place. It has something to do with broadcasting the reputation of one that you want revenge against. Revenge cannot take the form of an eye for an eye, not like that. (1986)

He repeated himself so often that some of what he said seeped into the ears. (p190)

One of the first things I ever noticed and loved about reading is that words can get through all kinds of barriers; they can get through skin color and culture. It's so easy to read and go through all kinds of struggles with an author. I love the way, when we read, we actually take on the mind of the person that we're reading. (1990)

Once upon a time, a man, named Tang Ao, looking for the Gold Mountain, crossed an ocean, and came upon the Land of Women. The women immediately captured him, not on guard against ladies. When they asked Tang Ao to come along, he followed; if he had had male companions, he would've winked over his shoulder. (first lines)

"We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment." (Brave Orchid, p154, "At the Western Palace")

I feel that it's part of my work as an artist, a creator, a human being, is to integrate and to be more inclusive and to define American as large and not as exclusive. (2007)

I feel that I break through pigeonholes of what's fiction and what's nonfiction, of what an autobiography is. (1990)

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. (p19)

The only way to get any work done-without polling everybody, as in a statistical study in sociology-is to give your own peculiar vision; because that's what's interesting, the way one person sees the world. It's up to other people to ask themselves whether they think like that or not. And if they don't think like you, that should be very exciting to them. They would read about something that they are completely unfamiliar with... I was just in Hong Kong and I loved seeing Chinese who were different from myself. To think of the possibility of another way of being Chinese or being a human being is much more exciting than to see someone just like me.

I want English professors to put my books on regular reading lists. An American writer. We have worked hard for fairness in the job market and housing and schooling, and our art should not be segregated out. Readers ought not to have boring preconceptions of what a story is about just because its author is "ethnic." "Ethnic writer" and "feminist writer" have been used dismissively.

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. (p12, "No Name Woman")

She's lived for a long time, and in many places. Lucky to have her here now. (p268)