Maxine Hong Kingston Quotes

I don't want anybody attached to me forever with gratitude. (p85)

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. (p64)

sometimes I think writing has nothing to do with me and that I shouldn't take credit for it. I feel that something comes from outside through me onto the typewritten paper. Often, I sit at the typewriter and compose stuff I didn't even know I knew. It happens all the time. It's not like I've decided what I'm going to write. (1977)

These struggles have got to result in happy endings for all, and the readers must learn not to worship tragedy as the highest art any more. (1990)

I think that in order to recognize a warm-hearted human being, you have to be a warm-hearted human being yourself.

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. (p61)

Linda wrote in her Ph.D. dissertation: "Vietnam duty provided the most unambiguous source of antiwar sentiment." War causes peace. (p227)

(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)

There's a redemption that takes place in art (1990)

(Q: "will that be your major goal-to achieve peace?") Yes, yes-to put out into the world a vision of peaceful living and of how human beings can relate to one another harmoniously and joyfully and how groups of people come together. I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books.

Mental work was harder than physical work, although it was not exactly the mind that teaching strained. (p41)

One of the things he (Thích Nhất Hạnh) says is that we don't know how to feel peace. We don't understand the joy that is peace. We think that it's boring. And that is an aesthetic and a social perception. He is dealing with many of these same problems we are facing, and I just know he has some answers. (1991)

There is a refusal to understand that an American can look like one of us and doesn't have to be white. (1989)

I had to get out of hating range. (p52)

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. (p87)